According to the 1986 study "The State of Small Business: A Report to the President," the number of women-owned small businesses increased annually by 9.4 percent from 1977 to 1983. This increase was well above the annual 4.3 percent increase in men-owned businesses.
The delegates to the White House Conference on Small Business that same year provided a snapshot of trends and issues that are shaping small business. On average, the businesses represented at that conference were smaller; most had fewer than 25 employees and more of them were in service industries: 47%, compared with 39% in 1980.
Speaking from a personal perspective, I find it very exciting to be part of this "economic trend," even though I didn't start out my library career in the entrepreneurial sector.
I was a Library Baby, starting out as a Page in high school and moving up to Circulation Clerk and then Technical Services Clerk through college and graduate school. I hold an Associate's degree in Business Administration, a Bachelor's degree in Fine Arts and a Master's degree in Library Science (1978). Hence, you have an entrepreneurial librarian who likes to do her company's advertising and public relations work!
My first professional position was setting up a federally funded Job Information Center for Eastern Long Island (New York). I purchased the furniture, did acquisitions, cataloguing and processing, provided reference services and resume counseling, and lectured extensively throughout our service area. In short, I was a regular "one-woman traveling band."
When my Job Center was not funded early in 1981, I moved to audio-visual and young adult services. My responsibilities included cataloguing of AV and YA titles. 1982 brought me to New York City and the Mercantile Library, a 162-year-old private lending library. I was the Head of Public Services and supervised a staff of fourteen.
In 1983, I added law as a subject specialty to my cataloguing skills as the Cataloger for New York County Lawyers Association, the city's downtown bar association. It was about this time that I realized that cataloguing was the part of each prior position that had given me the most satisfaction.
Through my contacts with law firm librarians, I discovered the need for good cataloguing in the private law sector. For many reasons, the Library of Congress Cataloguing Distribution Service doesn't meet the needs of a law library as well as it meets those of public and small academic libraries. And, although many law collections are represented in OCLC and RLIN, those records require significant editing for quality and consistency. A law library stills needs a skilled cataloger to enhance the records.
So, in answer to that need, I founded CASSIDY CATALOGUING SERVICES, INC. in 1985 after eighteen months of informal contract cataloguing projects for various law firm libraries. One such project was at a Wall Street firm that subscribed to OCLC. Even though the environment there was not a comfortable one for me, I welcomed the opportunity to learn online cataloguing from the best law cataloger I have ever worked with. During that period, most of my work was done from home with an electronic typewriter, and one part-time clerk to assist me onsite.
A year later, the company was automated by my husband, Michael, then a full-time theatre lighting technician working for Cassidy Cataloguing in his "spare" time. The law/business bibliographic database he set up in 1986 has grown to more than 90,000 records and serves as the heart of the company's activities today. By 1988, in-house and client demand for technical computer support led to his full-time commitment to the company and its future growth.
We opened our first office in Manhattan on February 4, 1989 when the best law cataloger I ever worked with left Wall Street and joined our staff. The office was one room, 250 square feet in size. We moved over the next four years into two successively larger offices in the same building. Then, on December 10, 1993 at 6:20 P.M., a staff member and I were robbed at gunpoint and tied up in our own office. We left the Big Apple the following month for safer, larger, commercial space in New Jersey. Clearly, one of the advantages of self-employment is the ability to make decisions of this kind. You have the power to establish your own quality of life and working environment.
With a full-time staff of 9.5 (2.5 degreed catalogers, 1 copy cataloger currently in library school, 2 paraprofessionals, 2 clerks, 1 systems administrator/CFO and me, the administrator/CEO), our company provides cataloguing and other technical services to 50+ law and corporate libraries. In addition to the private law firms and corporations we provide services to, our past and present client list includes three northeast law schools, one of the Smithsonian museums, and the New York Law Institute.
Most of the actual cataloguing and computer work is done in our New Jersey office, where catalog and shelflist cards, book catalogs and labels are produced. Our staff works onsite at one-quarter of our client libraries comparing their holdings to records in our database for full retrospective conversion projects. For titles they don't find in our database, they photocopy title pages and record the bibliographic details needed for original cataloguing. Then they return to the library at a later date to file cards, attach labels to books, etc. Records are delivered to the library on disks in USMARC II format. As the labeling progresses, we shift and re-arrange the books into correct classification order. We provide maintenance cataloguing services to most of the libraries we have retroed.
We are one of the few companies in the United States that provide this specialized service to law libraries, "cataloguing" being an area of librarianship that few librarians choose as their specialty and "law" being a subject area familiar to few catalogers.
Cassidy Cataloguing has worked to attain a reputation for high-quality cataloguing in the law library community. My staff and I have lectured extensively on the successful application of national bibliographic standards to the private firm setting and, I believe, we have been instrumental in the widespread acceptance of those standards by making high-quality records available to firms too small to add a cataloger to their staff. In addition, we are active in professional associations, both national and regional, supporting a strong commitment to continuing library education in the area of technical services.
To that end, we have sometimes functioned as a learning incubator hosting "guest catalogers" from time-to-time who work full-time for a law firm and part-time for us fine-tuning their skills.
In 1991, we were invited to participate in a joint venture with Gaylord Information Systems, a division of Gaylord Bros. Gaylord introduced a new database of detailed MARC cataloguing records for the specialized subject areas of law and business on compact disk. Records are accessed using Gaylord's CD-ROM MARC Cataloguing System, "SuperCat." These records are contributed by Cassidy Cataloguing Services, Inc. and updated quarterly. We were chosen for this new product along with the cataloguing records of the National Library of Medicine, the recognized authority in medical cataloguing.
In 1993, we expanded from a regional to an international service area overnight by altering our methodology to provide contract cataloguing by mail. Three-quarters of our clients contract for services of this kind. That same year, we went into the union list business, compiling and maintaining serials holdings for regional groups of law libraries.
On the subject of going from "Librarian" to "Independent Contractor," I'll say this: as in the case of any crisis in your life, you'll be amazed at what you can do when you have to. Another small business owner wrote: "If you want to grow as a person and you want to really test who you are, you start your own business."
Certainly library school prepared me for the cataloguing and technical services work that's the heart of our business and I manage all our various projects, making any policy decisions that are required. My education, graduate and undergraduate, helps me to supervise our staff, advertise and promote our services, write professionally, lecture nationwide, and do my own research. Most importantly, my degree lends credibility to our company and the services we provide. That is to say, people trust us with their libraries and I believe that is the key to our success. But, nothing except experience will prepare you for negotiating with clients, dealing with accountants, lawyers, the IRS, bankers, insurance agents, long-distance carriers, software vendors, landlords, suppliers, and all the other folks who will interact with your business. I am lucky in that my husband was willing to take responsibility for all our financial affairs (money in/money out) freeing up my time for client development, project management and staff supervision.
The ideal situation would be to start a business doing something you do well and which gives you some pleasure. Start it part-time while you have a "day job" to fall back on. The security of knowing you have a paycheck coming in will free up your mind for creative business development and allows you to take some risks. If possible, work awhile for an independent contractor providing services to the market segment you wish to tap.
Be active in professional associations, attend meetings, work on committees, speak at conferences, run for elected office. These activities can go far in establishing awareness of your services. Most importantly, you will gain acceptance as a professional peer. If possible, you want to present your services as a way of extending, or enhancing, an existing library staff, not as a way of replacing them. Outsourcing, the use of outside contractors, will be most successful, in my humble opinion, where it is used in conjunction with in-house staff to provide expertise in a particular area or to add extra hands for labor-intensive projects such as retrospective conversion, bar-coding or reclassification.
There are no limits when you run your own business. You make your own hours. Sometimes that equals all your waking hours. Your income is limitless, too. It has no ceiling, but it also has no floor! If it's your business, the gains AND the losses are yours.
But, there's also no limit to the sense of satisfaction and pride when things go right and you know that clients appreciate the work you're doing for them and your staff shows you that they share your vision and they're playing on your team.