In the early 1990s, Marcie Stone was one of about 30 people on the Federal Web Consortium, a team responsible for creating the very first public-facing websites for the U.S. government’s Executive Branch agencies. Her decades-long career on the frontiers of digital information epitomizes the reach and relevance of librarianship. Yet, in her own words, she got to library school at the University of Washington “completely by accident.”
After Stone, a Seattle native, earned her undergraduate degree in English at the UW in 1969, she and her husband Dave, ‘68, moved to Germany for Dave’s Army assignment. When he received orders for Vietnam, she set her sights on returning to the UW for graduate school. But her English M.A. application was not on time. She thought about her mother’s friend who was a librarian and UW alum. “She was a force of nature,” Marcie Stone recalled. “I figured if she enjoyed being a librarian, I probably would too. So I applied.”
Stone, M.Lib. ‘76, is now a ubiquitous and valued fixture on campus. She also is the recipient of this year’s Information School Distinguished Alumni Award, which recognizes alumni who have made significant and exceptional contributions to the information field and their communities.
“Marcie and Dave are very much creatures and citizens of the university,” said Associate Professor Joseph Janes. “The life of this university, the life of this campus, the life of this school — those all mean a great deal to both of them.” In her retirement, Marcie Stone has served on the MLIS Advisory Board, the UW Alumni Board of Trustees and the Meany Center Advisory Board.
Stone’s career in federal libraries got its start in Germany on a small Army post, where, since it was the only English-speaking library around, she did everything from storytime and salt clay relief map workshops to helping with doctoral dissertations. When she and Dave were transferred to Washington, D.C., she worked at the Pentagon Library, managing classified military documents and wrestling with clunky encryption equipment she hoped would boot up each morning. Later, at the Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC), she worked to support the center’s mission of documenting and distributing technical reports about research performed with Department of Defense funding.
“Then the internet happened,” she said. “And that changed everything.”
The underlying technology for the internet, including the HTTP and HTML protocols, was developed at the Defense Department. The Clinton administration’s goal to reinvent government and increase transparency, according to Stone, depended on leveraging those innovations. “Al Gore didn’t really invent the internet,” Stone joked about the former vice president, “but he did a lot to support it.”
“Working with the new technology was one of the most exciting professional opportunities that any of us had had. We were making it up as we went along.”
The government looked to the DTIC to create the first websites for the Office of the Secretary of Defense and the Army and Air Force. Overseen by the National Science Foundation, the team ultimately created around 100 websites, and their work established the foundation for thousands of Defense Department and military websites to come. Shepherding the executive branch into the digital age was exhilarating for the team, Stone recalled. “Working with the new technology was one of the most exciting professional opportunities that any of us had had. We were making it up as we went along,” she said.
She approached this pioneering work as a librarian, frequently relying on a skill she developed at the UW: the reference interview, during which the interviewer guides clients or patrons to articulate what they actually need, rather than what they initially ask for. She explained that her team would field customer requests that often described the technology they thought they wanted to use rather than the outcome they desired. She’d respond: “Don’t tell us how to do it yet. Just tell us what you want done, and we’ll figure out how to do it.” Collaboration was also key. She worked with a program analyst and IT specialist, and, she recalled, “we listened with different kinds of ears to what they were saying.”
If Stone’s journey to the UW library school, which is now of course the iSchool, was happenstance, so was her return to and ensuing involvement on campus. “I picked her up in a bar,” former Dean Harry Bruce said, referencing a running joke between the two of them. They’d met at an alumni event at a bar in Washington, D.C., and Bruce was captivated by her intelligence and how she’d applied her librarianship education and training.
He recalled: “She’d spent all of her career working in government, not in traditional library, public library or university library settings. I knew our students would be very inspired by the career path she had chosen.” Stone herself was interested in how the Graduate School of Library and Information Science was transforming into the Information School, broadening the options and opportunities that come out of the degree programs.
Bruce invited Stone to get involved in the iSchool community if she ever returned to Seattle, and to his surprise, a few years later, she knocked on his office door. Stone co-chaired the iSchool’s portion of the university-wide $6 billion “Be Boundless” fundraising campaign, which easily surpassed the iSchool’s contribution goals using a message rooted in librarianship’s humble and rewarding sense of purpose.
Janes echoed that Marcie and Dave Stone are animated by the question of what they can do to increase opportunities for generations to come. “It’s absolutely genuine, completely authentic, and they live it. This university engenders that kind of affection in many people. But they’re a rare breed.”
Stone admits she never expected the honor of the Distinguished Alumni Award. “It’s validation for what I did, obviously, but still I was very surprised and gratified,” she said. “What Dave and I do on campus are things we enjoy so much that we don’t realize that we’re doing anything extraordinary.”
Those who’ve known and worked with her, however, would insist otherwise. “Marcie gives herself to what she believes in, and she’s given a lot of herself to the iSchool," said Bruce. “She is the type of person you meet and think, ‘I feel better about myself having connected with her.’”