Gail Schlachter, a mythical librarian who created one of the first databases on monetary assistance opportunities.
A lot of other people enjoyed it. Many others enjoyed his work.It began in the 1970s, when Schlachter published an e-book on college scholarships for women, and then another for other people of color.Then one for other people with disabilities.
Schlachter turned his studies into a lifelong business that is a legacy. Students crave higher education, even when few schools care a lot about them: they can move to a library, use Schlachter’s books, and find cash to fund their educational ambitions.
Over the more than four decades, the university has only been more expensive.Today’s academics want scholarships more than ever, but the way they look for those opportunities has changed.
“The concept of going to the library and getting an e-book from a reference librarian, and writing on paper the names of the scholarships you might be interested in, is over,” says R.David Weber, Schlachter’s longtime collaborator and friend..
In 2015, the 72-year-old librarian knew she had to make knowledge of her scholarships searchable online and was about to do so when she suddenly died.
He left friends and readers grateful, and a meticulous database.The genre is so well organized, cataloged and crossed that it makes investors and technology marketing specialists want ideas.
What happened next shows how the Internet has replaced librarian roles and how others locate and think about data.It’s a story about what happens when this data goes from being a smart public product to a personal product, and about hidden prices of knowledge that seems free.
“The end,” says Schlachter’s son, “is a bit tragic.”
But only if that’s the end.
The words other people use to describe Schlachter are mystical.They say he looked like a leprechaun. She’s a whirlwind, radiant.
“Just bright and bright, that smile that would soften a stadium,” says Courtney Young, librarian at Colgate University.
And Schlachter also advised. In 1978, she published “The Directory of Financial Aid for Women”.In 1979, for the first time, women outnumbered men at American universities.
Schlachter entered the publishing industry through his studies as an academic.She was the first user to earn a phD in bibliotheology from the University of Minnesota.That same year, 1971, she divorced her husband and moved with her two young children to Southern California.where she held positions of librarian and professorships at several universities.To help other PhDs choose thesis topics, he has written an annotated bibliography of library dissertations.When his publisher stated that an edition of the moment would be too giant to produce and asked him to restrict the scope of the project, he said he had ended what he called the “intellectual commitments” of the classical publishing process.
Schlachter founded Reference Service Press, a business of a circle of relatives, funded with $10,000 loaned to his parents; Schlachter’s mother wrote the invoices by hand; their children handed books to the workplace in red cars.
“My brother and I were the Department of Development,” says Sandy Hirsh, Schlachter’s daughter and associate dean of academics at the Faculty of Professional and Global Education at San Jose State University.”That’s what we do in the night after school.books, folding flat boxes, putting books on them, using duct tape to seal books, putting labels, stamps, placing invoices.
Initially, the press a part-time commission in which Schlachter dealt with his educational paintings and, later, his executive role at ABC-Clio Press.But in 1985, she devoted all her attention to running her business.
“Gail is an innovator,” says Weber, the type of user he cited as an example in the economics categories he taught in the Los Angeles Community College District.”I would communicate about the role of a capitalist, an innovator, in an economic system.I said, “I know a user like that!”
When an editorial magazine asked Schlachter to offer a percentage of commercial recommendation to other librarians, she suggested, “Identify a need, use your library skills to fill it, and be informed about how to sell it.”
The desire known through Schlachter is that of scholarships.She is involved in reports that men get monetary assistance that is disproportionate to that of women.There may be an “information gap” on costs and subsidies that were reserved exclusively for women.Maybe just tip the scales as you look for those opportunities and share them.Them.
“There has been a radical replenishment in the population of students going to college and all those systems suitable for them, but there is no position where recipients can be more informed,” says Eric Goldman, Schlachter’s son and a professor at the University of Santa Clara School.law.” Actually, I was motivated by this feminist concern.How can we get more women to go to college?Get a better deal?
The interest shown through libraries in the acquisition of the “Repertory of Financial Aid for Women” indicated that Reference Service Press had discovered its niche.
The next e-book in Schlachter’s series was a “Financial Aid Repertory for Minorities,” a year’s sleep divided into separate volumes for African Americans, Asian Americans, Hispanic Americans, and Native Americans.An e-book was published for veterans, the corps of army workers and their families.in the 1980s, as well as an e-book for other people with disabilities.Then, one consultant to look for cash to examine and another for merit help.
The books, connected between white covers, have become more specific, their titles increasingly resemble the words that a student today can simply insert into a Google search: “Money for graduate students in fitness science”; “Money for Christian College Students”; “How to pay for your nursing degree.”
All this was promoted through the scholarship database created through Schlachter, which grew to approximately 30,000 entries, each element was strictly classified to imply what types of academics they request for what opportunities.support has worked.
“Coming from a low-income background, with a single mother and 3 sisters, I didn’t think I would ever be able to get a smart college education,” one former reader wrote.”However, those books from the local library helped my sisters and I implemented and graduated from well-qualified universities.I can even dream of a law school because of my low undergraduate debt!
Schlachter’s publishing space has thrived. Her books have been rewarded and, in the meantime, she has maintained her ties to the library community.She has held leadership positions in state and national organizations, as president of the Association of Reference and User Services of the American Library Association and editor in -director of its magazine, actively participated in Reforma, an arrangement that advocates to offer Latin American and Spanish-speaking communities more library and materials.
This work, along with Schlachter’s “incredibly encouraging” welcome to newcomers, revealed his commitment to adding others, Young says.
“Some other people probably incriminate it and say it’s color blind.That’s not all. He’s noticed the other people they’re for.She’s very interested in other people’s potential,” Young says.”She’s very interested in things that could be perceived as radicals.”from the outside, however, that’s what she was inside.
When Young ran for the presidency of the American Library Association in 2014 and 2015, he asked Schlachter to be treasurer of his campaign.Schlachter agreed and then contributed his own cash to the effort, so Young did not care about expenses.
Young won the race. The following year, Schlachter herself was elected to the board of directors of the association.
“It’s one of the main achievements for her,” Young says.”Serving in combination is a joy.”
At an ALA board meeting in April 2015, friends posed for a photo dressed in black and white skirts.
That was the last time they saw each other. A few days later, Schlachter showed up at the hospital.
A database is an organism. The keeper is Dave.
Every day, Dave wakes up, opens his computer and searches the Internet for scholarship data.Take your 10-year-old computer wherever you go.He took her with her a recent stay at the hospital, using the facility’s Wi-Fi to navigate.monetary aid websites from your bed.
You’re not paid for this job. However, it continues to “walk away”, as he describes it, to update the database with new data for approximately one thousand scholarships per month.
“It is such an important component of my life,” he said. I like to joke with my friends: “If I didn’t do this, what would I do? Do you hang out in pool halls and bars?”
Dave is David Weber, and he met Schlachter for the first time at The Midwest Doctoral School.They lost contact after graduating (history for him, bibliotechnology for her) and reconnected later, when they ended up running in Southern California.
“She’s my most productive friend and I’m hers,” Weber says.
Her children had non-unusual birthday parties.They all shared data that the other might appreciate, such as when Schlachter informed Weber that an airline had a pass for unlimited airfares.And when Weber “a little messy” after divorcing, Schlachter lured him to Reference Service Press, becoming hired and assigning him to write the e-book on veterans scholarships.
“They clicked. They were as in sync with others as they were friends,” says Goldman, Schlachter’s son.”Decades have passed, one of the wonderful relationships that can expand among people.”
When Weber discovers new data about an inventory exchange, it enters it into its database software.He’s still doing some of the paintings in Microsoft Word.The primary database log is 48.4 megabytes, almost too large for Word, so it becomes slow.
“You don’t have to surround me for a few days,” Weber said.”I use bad words. I swear in Spanish.
However, it is less difficult than before. The pictures Weber is making online today, he and Schlachter were doing it by hand.They sent letters to scholarship sponsors, asking them to respond with the latest data on what they were offering.and arranged them for photography and printing.
“It’s literally a copy-and-paste job,” Weber recalls.
The procedure has evolved with the improvement of technology.The database has everything from paper to floppy disks, PC tapes and word processing programs.
Schlachter went beyond books to experiment with the delivery of virtual knowledge.In the mid-1990s, academics were able to locate the company’s studies on CD-ROM or America Online.Reference Service Press received your email address: [email protected] agreements with organizations seeking to make their members aware.Clients included the American Association of Military Officers and the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma.
But Schlachter sought to do more so that his knowledge could be searched online.She sought help from Eureka, a California-based nonprofit that offers virtual employment consulting with the slogan “A Gold Mine of Professional Information.”
The librarian is not ashamed of her standards.
“She was very, very involved with her knowledge and how it would be used,” says Mr. Sumyyah Bilal, executive director of Eureka.
Schlachter visited Eureka’s workplace all the time, Bilal said.The staff enjoyed it. He tickled to hear Bilal’s son from the librarian how to fix the website.He would later joke with Bilal: “Why don’t you communicate like Gail?”
“He enjoyed the way she spoke kindly, but he never gave up, ” said Bilal.”I had a way of introducing you to some of the worst critics in the world in such an eloquent way that you felt I had criticized you.
At the time of the collaboration with Eureka, the reference service’s press book sales began to decline, Weber said. In 2015, the company’s diagnosis was clear.
“Libraries that had subscribed to all e-books through Reference Service Press, the city’s large libraries, would buy 10 copies of the women’s eBook, canceled their orders,” Weber says.”Libraries no longer use reference e-books.”
They don’t even use the term “reference,” says Steven Bell, a university librarian associate at Temple University libraries and a former Library Journal columnist.When his establishment designed a new library, he completely removed the search references section, relegating the small collection of large, unfed books to his automated garage and recovery system.Instead of published books, he and his colleagues are now helping academics and teachers use aggregated virtual databases such as Credo Reference and Gale Virtual Reference Library.
“These teams are much less difficult to search, you get the accurate data you need,” Bell says.”To be to send studies to a lot of encyclopedias at once, from my attitude as a scholar and as someone who teaches academics how to do studies., I think they’re much more powerful and physically resilient equipment.”
Meanwhile, Schlachter awaited his own diagnosis. She was late in getting a medical check-up until after the ALA board assembly and then went to the hospital for the regime procedure.
“She started bleeding and died, ” said Weber. How can you get to the hospital and die?That’s what happened. It’s a shock.
Schlachter had brought with his notes a new scholarship ebook for LGBT students, weber says: “He died running in what would have been the last addition to the RSP list.”
The press has been orphaned. So Weber followed him.Whenever he took the train, went to the beach or visited his house at the time in Mexico, the database was at his fingertips.
Weber may simply continue your friend’s research, but it may not be the entire company.
That’s when an angel investor showed up.
Despite all the data that published books provide to readers, they do not retrieve any data.
This asymmetry is rare in publication.Many websites ask users to provide percentages of nonpublic data, while many others simply take them without asking.
Giving for pay is the librarian’s style. Drew Magliozzi, a Boston entrepreneur, wonders if this can also be his way.
It describes his vision of an open-access virtual knowledge base on inventory exchanges, which would be rigorously maintained.It would be loose to use. And it collects non-public knowledge of students, or at least sells it elsewhere.
“What I have proposed to you is not a business at all, which is a challenge, so we didn’t,” Says Magliozzi.
His father and uncle are Click and Clack, the brothers who organized NPR’s long screen “Car Talk”.And he is the co-founder of AdmitHub, a company that develops chatbots for universities.AdmitHub has an inventory exchange database acquired at the suggestion of one of the company’s first investors, Walter Winshall.
Before Winshall was a successful investor in new generations, or co-founder of library generation corporations SilverPlatter and Computer Library Services, or the subject of a 1967 TIME magazine profile to enroll in Harvard Law School and MIT Business School, she went to the best school in Detroit with a woman who grew up to become a librarian.
“Gail, one of her dear friends, ” said Magliozzi. I’ve met at least a dozen people who say Gail is their most productive friend.”
Winshall and Schlachter were the first trading partners. In the past 1980s, when the librarian was not satisfied with that of a company that turned reference resources into virtual databases, she tried to work with the Winshall company and was impressed.in the press in California, where he painted with his dog.
“The phone rang. She’d take the call. He said, “I’ll make you live, ” said Winshall.He went to the workplace that answered the sales calls, to another workplace.workplace and take the call sitting to a new workplace.It’s fun, it’s extraordinary, it seems to be a much bigger business than it is.
After Schlachter’s death, Winshall tried to help his circle of relatives locate a new house for Reference Service Press and they searched for it to survive.They didn’t need to take care of themselves.
The press is too small to interest giant companies, so Winshall took it to Magliozzi, thinking admitHub might find it useful.
Magliozzi intrigued.
“At first glance, it looked like an e-book publishing house.It took a complicated eye to see what could be beyond what it was,” he says.”I wasn’t interested in an undeniable catalogue of scholarships.The amazing thing was with the eebook code for the data.It’s a catalog of scholarships, but labeled, organized, as only a user with a degree in bibliotechnology would dream.”
Printed, the code e-book has many pages and understands the main points that Schlachter has thoroughly accumulated about academics applying for which scholarships.There are codes to everything from the wonders of Magliozzi, from the scholars whose ancestors fought in the Civil War to the left.delivered scholars.
Perhaps, Magliozzi thought, such a comprehensive database could feed a scholarship chatbot.
AdmitHub now has cash; In January 2020, it raised $7.5 million from primary corporations such as Google and Salesforce, but at the time, the startup did not have much cash at the bank, as a result, acquired Reference Service Press for debt.
Weber, the custodian of the database, component of the package, in exchange for his services, received a share in AdmitHub.
“David is what helps keep her alive,” Magliozzi says on the database.”Without it, things would fade away.
Weber and AdmitHub continued to update and reprint books on scholarships.In 12 months, the startup has regained its investment in the press, thanks to the license fees of the clients.
Meanwhile, AdmitHub has built a prototype bag chatbot.The tool asks you about your age and your end of life, then moves on to questions about where you live, the schooling point you’ve finished, and what you need to study.The chatbot grants, usually some charge $500, others $10,000.
The product is good, says Magliozzi, but you want many more paintings to be, a resource that relies on behavioral science and synthetic intelligence to make it not only useful to students, but also attractive.
In any case, however, it is no longer the paintings that make sense for AdmitHub, he says.The company’s original purpose of serving academics directly.Then his business style changed. Today, most of its clients are universities and it is not transparent where a scholarship chatbot or referral service press database is located.
“In a startup with limited resources, you only have time for your top priorities.First, second, never,” says Magliozzi,It’s still anything that, opportunistically, interests me, but I’m essentially looking to locate the right spouse who would do anything about it.”
Competitors can simply take note. More than 30 Internet sites offer virtual scholarship search tools, according to the National Association of Scholarship Providers.Most of them are loose for academics: that cash rate is more likely to be scams, the association reports.Many sites collect data about users, which they sell to third parties to find new leads or to attract advertisers.
Maintaining the accuracy of these teams is a challenge.
“Virtually all scholarships are aware that the year is adjusted, such as application deadlines, for example.But the availability of scholarships, amounts, eligibility criteria and other vital facets also replace frequently,” said Jackie Bright, executive director of the National Association of Scholarship Providers.in an email interview.” Therefore, it is very difficult to keep up with this amount of conversion knowledge for the huge amount of adjustments in North America.”
Reference Service Press may have turned out to be like those sites.It plunged into the Internet at the same time as Fastweb, some other inventory exchange site, rushed first.Born in 1995, Fastweb hired a party study team to a dozen other people to locate and read about monetary assistance opportunities, which it then compared with student users based on their non-public characteristics.To stay up-to-date, it relied on technology teams that were looking for adjustments on scholarship websites: Fastweb manually weber paints are now owned by Monster.com.
Or maybe the press has become Scholarship Universe, some other service that connects academics with personalized scholarship recommendations.The product, which was first developed at the University of Arizona, is now a component of the CampusLogic corporate monetary student portfolio, which sells subscriptions over it to universities, making it available to academics for free.
Would these models appeal to a librarian? This is what weighs on Magliozzi, who says he has a comfortable place in his center for loose and open databases, and wonders if a nonprofit would be willing to pay the prices of creating a database from Schlachter’s database.”Wikipedia in particular for scholarships,” he says, allowing thousands of people to make the paintings Weber is doing lately alone.
“Where can this live digitally so that it is in the hands of a user and in everyone’s hands?” he thinks.
Supporting a complicated scholarship search tool through philanthropy is imaginable; in theory, says Mark Kantrowitz, who helped build the scholarship search formula for Fastweb.
“It’s a very expensive business to have a database,” says Kantrowitz, editor and vice president of SavingForCollege.com.”You have to sell it to someone. Either you sell it to promote it to promote it on websites, or you’re related to a nonprofit that has cash from some other source, and uses it to cover costs.»
Weber knows that AdmitHub has transparent plans for Reference Service Press.For the purposes, it is inspired by the other virtual monetary aid knowledge bases you’ve seen.He says they’re accurate. That his knowledge is bad or that they make money promoting student names, and he doesn’t like it.
“This is what AdmitHub faces today: how can it become paints in the business we do?”Weber said.” We don’t know if we have the answer.”
But a nonprofit organization for military families can do it.
Brian Gawne is a base executive, retired flight attendant and father of 3 children born within five years.When the young children were in high school, Gawne knocked them down and exposed their case.
“If I gave you $500 for an hour’s work, would you?” he told them.”And if I gave you $50 for an hour’s work, would you?”
They intrigued. Gawne continued.
“Here are 10 small scholarship programs I need you to fill out,” he said.”It will probably take you an hour to write the app for them.If you only have one, it costs $50 an hour. Then it begins, writing.
Gawne works for the Fisher House Foundation, a nonprofit that builds apartments near the military and veterans hospitals so that patients’ circle of relatives can stay close. The organization also awards scholarships to the youth of service members.
Therefore, Gawne knew that his career in the Navy could make it take merit assistance to help his own army youth pay for his college education.He tried the same old websites, but discovered that their effects were too generic, believing that every other parent in the country would also tell their young people to apply for the apparent scholarships from giant companies.
Gawne then discovered a database hosted through the Association of Military Officers of America.I had grants I couldn’t locate in bourses.com.Grants in particular designed for veterans’ youth, like yours.. Naval Officer Spouse Club grants in Washington, D.C.
“We’ve reduced demographics so it’s not the general public,” Gawne says.”Most likely, few people are aware of this.”
Finally, the Officers’ Association removed the database.Gawne Fisher House’s idea can fill the void.He called the organization and asked where he had received his data.The answer: Press Reference Service.
“A bell rang, ” said Gawne, When I was going to college for the first time, I went to the library and saw his white paper.”
Gawne tried to play the press. He redirected to AdmitHub and did the calculations.For the 20 Fisher House Foundation scholarships a year, the nonprofit can simply fund a virtual correspondence tool that would give more academics with more money.
“We can pay two million dollars in scholarships ourselves, or for a small part of that award, we can give tons of scholarships,” Gawne says.”Why reinvent the wheel when there are many wheels that others people just don’t know?”
AdmitHub: “I’d like a search engine.”
Fisher House has had scholarships for service since 2016, a tool that matches military families with corresponding scholarships, fueled by 15% of the Schlachter database faithful to such opportunities.
Free provides.
“When we created our search engine, we had no ulterior motives.It’s just about creating a tool for academics to locate scholarships.We do not collect their names or addresses. There is no goal to sell those products,” Gawne says.If you give us your email, you can do your search, and a PDF will be printed, and you will send them a PDF by email.”
The Fisher House Foundation is with the product, which attracted more than 21,000 visits between December 2019 and February 2020, with more than 11,000 new users.
The nonprofit renewed its knowledge licensing agreement with AdmitHub last year.Magliozzi says Scholarships for Service represents “the MVP” – or viable minimum product, as they say in the global startup – of what he would build from Reference Service Press, if he discovered the right partner.
“I don’t need to make money from that, I’d give it,” he says.”All I need is a footnote that indicates we’re involved.We are just a bankruptcy in history that is the database and the life of Gail.”
Gail Schlachter, a mythical librarian. She is revered in the California Library Hall of Fame, her work is in the archives of two universities, her publishing space has donated more than $150,000 in scholarships to more than 50 students from the library school, and her circle of family members is offering scholarships in her books are for sale on Amazon.They come with their new most recent title: “How to Pay Your Diploma in Bibliotechology and Information Sciences.”
Schlachter’s values are the same as the librarians still want today.
“The emphasis on intellectual freedom, creating access to data with as few obstacles as possible, being someone active in the community, making the library a welcoming place, those things have been part of what we do,” Bell, Temple University, said.
But the generation has played the part more complex than in the past, he adds.Data is scarce. Now it’s everywhere.
“The challenge is for the librarian: what is the price you give other people to locate information?” says Bell.
He’s for the referral service press: who will pay for this value?
Magliozzi publishes updates to Schlachter’s books and reflects on the future.Weber updates its database and remembers the past.At library conferences, librarians prevent their daughter in the hallways.
“There are still other people who come to me to tell me how much they miss you, what a difference she has made in their lives, how much she has guided, encouraged and believed in them,” Hirsh says.”These books are an extension of that, when you think about it.”
The soft flashes of Schlachter without warning. One day, as Young prepared the boxes for transfer to the new library task in a new state, a family doodle caught his eye, a post-it that Schlachter had to mail up:
You’re a woman and I greatly appreciate you. Gail.
“I’m the one who writes those notes. I’m the one who says things like that,” Young said.”Sometimes we wait to do it”.⚡
Rebecca Koenig (@becky_koenig) is a senior journalist at EdSurge and covers higher education.Contact her at rebecca [at] edsurge [dot] com.
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