O. David Sparkman grew up in the Dallas-Fort Worth area of Texas, one of two children. His father managed a refrigeration supply company and then owned a restaurant; his mother was a stenographer and then an office manager. Sparkman developed his interest in chemistry in high school and decided to attend North Texas State University for several reasons: it had a good reputation; it was close to home; it was inexpensive and had financial support; and it provided work in the chemistry department. William H. (Bill) Glaze was Sparkman’s mentor and has continued to be a friend and colleague. While at Oklahoma State University for a National Science Foundation (NSF) research fellowship, Sparkman decided he was interested in organic analytical chemistry and instrumentation; he taught himself nuclear magnetic resonance (NMR) and infrared spectroscopy (IR). Back at North Texas he became manager of the instrument room and taught quantitative inorganic analysis. He took a short course on the Spectrometric Identification of Organic Compounds sponsored by the American Chemical Society (ACS) held during a Southwest/Southeast combined Regional Meeting taught by Robert Silverstein and Clayton Bassler.

Wanting industrial experience, Sparkman took a job with the Western Company of North America, which provided oil field services. While there he made a library of gas chromatograms and IR spectra of the company’s corrosion-inhibitor components, his first foray into data provision and management. His activities at the Western Company served the company well in that using his library he identified a bad mixture and saved Western from a significant expense. During this time, he also reconnected with Bill Glaze and the two, with a couple of others, formed Analytical Consultants, Inc. (ACI), where he worked for two years. After leaving ACI, he joined Thuron Industries, a pesticides products manufacturer. Not long after, Zoëcon, a spinoff from Syntex with the goal of producing more ecological friendly pesticides, bought Thuron. When Zoëcon’s president, Carl Djerassi, visited Thuron, he was surprised to find that Sparkman was a skillful organic analytical chemist and knew of his publications in mass spectrometry.

From Thuron Sparkman joined with his old friend, colleague, and mentor, Bill Glaze, who had established a new environmental institute at North Texas. Minicomputers became available for data systems, and Sparkman, who had been recruited from Glaze’s institute by a computer company to work on the sales and development of a mass spectral data system, got Riber, a French mass spectrometry company, to buy Systems Industries’ data systems and was then hired by Riber to go to Paris to provide applications support and continued development. He then moved to California when Riber wanted to sell mass spectrometers in the United States; he sold the first one to Djerassi. When Riber went bankrupt, Sparkman went to New Jersey to work for JEOL Ltd. Microcomputers were becoming very significant at that point, and he and another employee left JEOL to form J&S Information Systems, a consulting firm. He also taught a gas chromatography/mass spectrometry (GC/MS) course, beginning in 1978, with J. Throck Watson (whom he had met while at Riber) for the ACS at PittCon and national meetings. Sparkman met his wife in New Jersey but was glad to go back to California and eager to get back into mass spectrometry. Varian was again manufacturing mass spectrometers; Sparkman was able to go to work for them. Varian was introducing a fairly new technology, the three-dimensional quadrupole ion trap (3D QIT). He liked this technology but not its bureaucracy, and he left for the Mass Spectrometry Data Center at the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST) some five years later, where he contributed to the development of a mass spectrometry search program and database of electron ionization spectra. Next Patrick R. Jones, Chairman of the Chemistry Department at the University of the Pacific, began a collaboration with Sparkman and had him teach courses in mass spectrometry as an adjunct professor. Sparkman founded the Pacific Mass Spectrometry Facility. Sparkman and Jack Watson had expanded their course offering to include a five-day, hands-on course taught at Michigan State University where Watson was a faculty member. When space became a problem at MSU, Sparkman moved the course to Pacific with the support of Watson.

At Varian Sparkman began to combine his love of books and history with his passion for mass spectrometry; he started to assemble his library. A new colleague that he met while consulting for a company that published software for chemists—one of their authors—introduced him to Powell Books, where he at once began to shop. Next AbeBooks received his largesse for its out-of-print books. He also persuaded the American Society for Mass Spectrometry (ASMS) to republish early works; Klaus Biemann’s was first. To keep together his extensive library—well over a thousand volumes on mass spectrometry alone—and the computer supplements he has accumulated, he has offered his collection to the Chemical Heritage Foundation (CHF), provided CHF keeps it all together.

Sparkman takes the interviewer on a tour of his library, explaining the organization; the various works themselves and their history; the reasons for their importance; and a number of related anecdotes. He talks about his most prized book, his most expensive, and his most elusive. He gives more information on where he has found the works. He mourns the attitude of libraries today, namely, “Toss them out!” but he also admits that he has benefited from this. He has even written a short article for the Bolton Society on the fun and frustration of book acquisition. He bemoans the decline in publishing standards, using his own recent work as an example. He believes that his greatest accomplishment has been in information management and access to information; he has not catalogued his library, but he has a list. He brokered an arrangement between Wiley Publishing and ASMS, a deal that allows members of ASMS to access all Wiley mass spectrometry journals that are online and are at least five years old. He believes his own collection is second only to Fred W. MacLafferty’s. Noting the importance of article titles in literature citation, he described his successful efforts to have all of the mass spectrometry journals, now, require this. Five years after this interview, Sparkman added an epilogue.