#library instructors

Our post today comes from Melissa Freiley, an LIS student at the University of North Texas and the library cataloging technician at Denton (TX) Indepedent School District.

“I get the biggest satisfaction from teaching,” Dr. Lois Mai Chan declared when asked about her greatest achievement in this 2014 video created by the Chinese American Librarians Association (CALA). From 1970 until 2011, Chan influenced hundreds of future catalogers as she taught cataloging at the University of Kentucky (UK) School of Library and Information Science in Lexington. But this wasn’t all she did.

Born on July 30, 1934, in Taiwan, Chan studied foreign languages at National Taiwan University and went on to earn a Master of Arts at Florida State University. In 1966, Chan began working at UK as a serials cataloger. She joined the faculty of the then-UK College of Library Science in 1970, and in 1980 became a full professor after obtaining her Ph.D. in comparative literature at UK.

Dr. Chan had a deep impact on cataloging and classification. Not only did she teach hundreds of future librarians during her forty-five years at UK, but she also wrote over sixty research articles and published over twenty books throughout her career, including the popular textbook Cataloging and Classification: An Introduction, now in its fourth edition. In 1989 she earned the Margaret Mann Citation, “the highest honor in cataloging bestowed by the American Library Association,” which has been given annually since 1951. [We just published a post about Margaret Mann, for whom the citation is named, earlier this month! –ed.] CALA awarded her the CALA Distinguished Service Award in 1992 for outstanding leadership and achievement in library science at the national and/or international level. In 2006 she received the Beta Phi Mu Award for her distinguished service in library education. During her career, she also served as a consultant to the Library of Congress and OCLC’s Faceted Application of Subject Terminology project.

Dr. Chan died on August 20, 2014, but her legacy lives on through the newly-created Lois Mai Chan Professional Development Grant, established by the Cataloging and Metadata Management Section (CaMMS) of the Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS) in 2017. The grant seeks to assist library workers from under-represented groups who are new to the metadata field in attending the American Library Association Annual Conference. The UK Lois Mai Chan Enrichment Fund also seeks to honor Chan’s legacy by providing assistance to UK students studying library science.

Dr. Chan may have believed that luck was the reason for her success, but her hard work and passion for library science and teaching are undeniable and inspiring.

Additional sources:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lois_Mai_Chan

https://web.archive.org/web/20150409034813/https://ci.uky.edu/lis/remembering-lois-mai-chan

http://www.ala.org/news/member-news/2017/04/new-alcts-award-honors-lois-mai-chan

https://uknow.uky.edu/campus-news/library-school-fund-established-honor-retired-professor-lois-chan

Today’s post comes from Violet Fox, who previously wrote ourpost about Henriette Avram. Violet is on Twitter at@violetbfox.

Margaret Mann (1873-1960) was a librarian and educator whose work and scholarship emphasized the role of theory in cataloging and classification. Her passion for information organization inspired the many students she taught to see cataloging and classification as an essential service to library users.

Born in Cedar Rapids, Iowa on April 9, 1873, as an adolescent Mann moved with her family to Chicago and graduated from Englewood High School. She enrolled at Chicago’s Armour Institute in 1893, as one of the first twelve students in the library program (the Armour Institute was only the fourth school for the education of librarians in the U.S. and the first west of the Alleghanies). There she studied preservation, cataloging, accessioning, and shelf-listing, as well as learning library hand. After graduating a year later, most of her cohort moved on to library jobs, but Mann was asked to stay on as an assistant at Armour, serving as a cataloger and occasional instructor. When the library science department was moved from Armour to the University of Illinois in 1897, Mann was appointed to the staff of the new program. While teaching at the University of Illinois, she also worked towards creating consistent policies of cataloging and classification within its library. Mann moved on to the Carnegie Library in Pittsburgh in 1902, serving as head of the Cataloging Department until 1919. From 1919 to 1924 she undertook a massive reorganization of the collections of the Library of the Engineering Societies in New York City.

After returning from teaching cataloging and classification at the École de Bibliothécaires in Paris in 1926, she began as an instructor at the University of Michigan as one of the first three faculty hired at the beginning of the school’s library science program. Unlike her own library school experience thirty years earlier, which was highly focused on everyday library practice, Mann’s publications and teaching focused on the need to understand the theory of cataloging and classification to serve library users well. Her textbook, “An Introduction to Cataloging and the Classification of Books,” first published in 1930 by ALA, was widely used by library schools and helped standardize the cataloging content taught to library students. She would remain at the University of Michigan until her retirement at age 65 in 1938, impressing upon her many students the important role of information organization in libraries.

Mann died in 1960 but her name and legend live on in the University of Michigan’s Margaret Mann Award, established in 1938, as well as in the Margaret Mann Citation, awarded yearly by ALA to recognize outstanding professional achievement in cataloging or classification. Mann was also listed within American Libraries’s 1999 article on “100 of the Most Important Leaders We Had in the 20th Century”.

Resources consulted:

Clack, Doris H. (1993). Education for Cataloging.Cataloging & Classification Quarterly, 16:3, 27-37, DOI: 10.1300/J104v16n03_04

Grotzinger, Laurel. (1970). Margaret Mann: The Preparatory Years.Journal of Education for Librarianship, 10:4, 302-315, DOI: 10.2307/40322089
University of Michigan Faculty History Project

Wikipedia biography of Margaret Mann