Beloved Library Coordinator Celebrates 30 Years at KCU

Robyn Oro may not be a Kansas City University alumna, but she is celebrating her own special anniversary in 2022. With a start date of August 31, 1992, Oro will celebrate her 30th anniversary working at Kansas City University.

She started when the library was still located at Mazzacano Hall near 7th Street and Garfield Avenue (now a parking lot at Samuel U. Rodgers Health Center). She and the library staff moved to Strickland Education Pavilion when it opened in 1996. Oro's last move was in February 2011 when D’Angelo Library opened on the Kansas City campus. During her time at KCU, she has held the titles of library assistant; cataloger assistant; and now she is access services/special collections coordinator – always with some circulation desk responsibility.

Oro recently shared several of her favorite memories over the past three decades of work at KCU.

This interview has been edited for length and clarity.

How have the KCU libraries evolved and changed over the last 30 years?

A lot. (She laughs.) We would get tons of paper journals we had to display. It took a long time just to check-in and file all the journals every month.

We had a lot of slides. There were cabinets around the perimeter of the first two libraries that were just slides. We had a lot of VHS tapes, and at one point, we had Betamax tapes as well. For about 10 years, a lot of the books that came out had CDs in the back. When that went away, we moved to DVDs. There was a period of time where lectures were recorded; [faculty] would burn a DVD and then send it to the library. The students could watch a lecture at the library and if they wanted to re-watch it, they could check out the DVD. Then, we switched to streaming.

I’ve watched library technology change from beginning to end. Almost all of our journals are electronic now. We still have bound paper journals that we keep, those are in the basement. We have some that go as far back as 1901.

What is one of the more memorable items you have discovered in the collections?

We have a bone saw from 1860. We’ve had people donate their papers and stories. We’ve got a Bronze Star that one of our alumni donated to us.

What have you learned the most from your work at KCU?

Osteopathic history. I had no idea what osteopathic medicine or osteopathy was when I first started. I’ve learned a lot about it. Also, the history of Northeast Kansas City. The University was almost always in Northeast and is part of the community here. As Northeast changed, [the University] changed, and they were kind of symbiotic.

When you think of KCU’s students and alumni, what adjectives come to mind?

The alumni are just the nicest people when they come back to visit. They’re really generous, and give back to the University. The students are very courteous, they study a lot. They spend hours and hours studying, and it’s really different from work at a public library.

What have you enjoyed the most about your work at KCU?

I think the history part of it. I helped a lot with the Centennial Book [in 2016]. That was fun to put together. 

Compiled and written by Adrianne DeWeese.