James 'Jim' H. Thompson (1934-2010) served as director of Jackson Library at The University of North Carolina at Greensboro (UNCG) from 1970-1988. He was also a member of the Department of History faculty, returned to full-time teaching and retired in 1994. Thompson talks about his educational background, arriving at UNCG to oversee the building of the Library Tower, the expansion of both the collections and staff and the introduction of new technologies to the library. He describes the high quality administrators, faculty, and staff (Dr. Warren Ashby, Dr. Richard Bardolph, Chancellor James S. Ferguson, Dean Ethel Lawther, Special Collections Librarian Emmy Mills, Vice Chancellor Mereb Mossman, and others); the excellence of teaching he found here; the exploding growth of enrollment and balancing the quality of teaching with the quantity of students. Thompson discusses minority recruitment, faculty status for librarians, working with budget constraints, lesser state funding for UNCG, and the newness of the Office of Development and fundraising efforts at the institution.
