Jackson Appeals Discrimination Case

A former Business School professor lodged an appeal last Friday to a federal ruling that Harvard did not base her tenure decision on gender, her counsel said yesterday.

Continuing an eight-year struggle for a senior faculty post, Barbara Bund Jackson '66 will challenge the decision on grounds that procedural errors by Harvard, including the destruction of 10 years of tenure documents, compromised the prosecution's case, said attorney Evan T. Lawson.

Judge Douglas P. Woodlock found this summer that although Harvard "deserved to be sanctioned" for its actions, the University had not attempted to sabotage Jackson's suit. Woodlock ultimately ruled that objective standards of scholarship, and not gender, led the B-School to deny her tenure twice.

Jackson sued the University and B-School Dean John H. McArthur in 1984. Harvard had denied her tenure once in 1981, and support was again withheld in 1983 after she published a monograph that received strong criticism from two B-School professors.

The appeal is expected to come before the U.S. Court of Appeals for the First Circuit in mid-1990, said Lawson.

HOLLIS Offers New Search Features

Harvard employees added several functions this summer to the University's year-old library computer directory system, despite slowdowns stemming from a denied funding increase.

Since mid-August, library workers have modified the Harvard On-Line Library Information System (HOLLIS) to allow readers to find books by entering key words from a title or subject, said Edward P. Tallent, Lamont reference librarian.

Other additions include a call-number search and a "trace" function to find related books in a particular subject, Tallent said.

One primary HOLLIS goal, however, to label all holdings with bar codes to expedite check-outs, was cut back after starting this July. Because of a lack of funding, neither Hilles nor Lamont library completed the work this summer as planned, said Heather E. Cole, librarian of both Hilles and Lamont.

Now, bar-codes are only put on new books as they are returned from borrowers, Cole said, and a budget request will be submitted next spring. Last May, the Faculty of Arts and Sciences (FAS) denied a special request for about $200,000 to hire part-time bar code installers, Cole said.

Both new and old books are being bar-coded now at Widener library, workers said.

Several other enhancements await down the pike. One that will tell users whether a book is available on-shelf is a "very high priority," said Jon Lanham, associate librarian of the Lamont Library, and is due next year.

Other projects include allowing users to access databases, such as journal indices, from HOLLIS and to tie the system with other University computers.