Theodore M.
National Council on Marine Resources, and that Ed wanted me to head up the
division temporarily, while he was gone, I felt that I had to say yes.
So in 1965 I became acting chief of the Science Policy Research Division,
while still holding the senior specialist position. The dual role continued two
years later when they asked me to be deputy director of the Legislative
Reference Service. This gave me much broader responsibilities, so I didn't do
as much in the water resources field. But I kept the two offices, and my
research assistant, Elizabeth Boswell, so we were able to field some of the
important requests, writing papers on congressional interest in water resources
and preparing legislative histories of the Water Resources Planning Act and
also the Water Resources Research Act and the history of the implementation
of the recommendations of the Senate Select Committee.
But that's why I have trouble answering the question "What did you do in the
Legislative Reference Service
So you were doing a lot of supervision as well as your water resources work.
A: Yes, that's right. The deputy director of the Legislative Reference Service at
that time really could have been called the director of research. The deputy
director was responsible for all of the research output responding to over
100,000 inquiries every year. Most of those were very simple inquiries for
information, but many of them were very significant research projects, and
those were the ones that I had to kind of supervise.
How many people did you have working for you then?
A: Well, the service had about 300 or 320 researchers and support staff. The
director handled the budget and liaison with other divisions of the Library. If
he was not there, I had to fill in for him. But it was not a big agency at the
time and we had no assistant directors. There were just a director and a deputy
director and about six division chiefs and a dozen independent senior
specialists. As deputy director, I was de facto chief of the Senior Specialists
Division and they all reported to me.
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