Obituaries
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Betty Mary Ellen Croft, 94, former head of the cataloging department at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign (UIUC) and director of Northwest Missouri State University Library in Maryville, died April 9.
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Kathie Coblentz, 73, rare materials cataloger at New York Public Library’s (NYPL) Stephen A. Schwarzman building, died April 6. Coblentz had been with NYPL since 1969, and she cataloged and revised cataloging of rare books and spe-cial collections in English and European languages. She also wrote Your Home Library: The Complete System for Organizing, Locating, Referencing and Maintaining Your Book Collection and coedited with Robert E. Kapsis collections of interviews of Clint Eastwood and Alfred Hitchcock.
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Vartan Gregorian, 87, president of the Carnegie Corporation of New York, who was awarded ALA Honorary Membership in 2000, died April 15. Gregorian had served from 1981 to 1989 as president of NYPL, where he formed a public–private partnership that helped restore the library’s standing after large cuts to funding and services. In 1989, he became president of Brown University, where he served until joining the Carnegie Corporation in 1997. Among his honors are the Presidential Medal of Freedom, the National Humanities Medal, France’s Chevalier of the Legion of Honor, and numerous honorary degrees.
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Latanya N. Jenkins, 45, who served as a reference librarian at Temple University in Philadelphia, Morgan State University in Baltimore, Bowie (Md.) State University, and as a diversity fellow at Purdue University in West Lafayette, Indiana, died April 13. Jenkins was an active member of ALA’s Government Documents Round Table, the Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), and ACRL’s African American Studies Librarians Interest Group. She frequently published and presented on government documents and information and on diversity, equity, and inclusion.
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James “Jim” Harvey Kirks Jr., 83, system coordinator for North State Cooperative Library System in Santa Rosa, California, for 27 years until retiring in 2002, died April 20. He had previously worked at Inglewood (Calif.) Public Library; the library at NATO Headquarters for Central Europe in Fontainebleau, France; and the North Olympic Library System in Clallam County, Washington.
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John T. Ma, 71, who served as a librarian, bibliographer, and curator at Columbia University in New York; Cornell University in Ithaca, New York; Hoover Institution at Stanford (Calif.) University; Leiden University in the Netherlands; and NYPL, died April 9. Ma held many leadership roles in the Chinese American Librarians Association (CALA), and received CALA’s Distinguished Award in 2009 for the Books-for-China Fund project, which identified and shared more than 100,000 books and journals with academic libraries in China.
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Cheryl McCarthy, 71, professor emerita of the University of Rhode Island Graduate School of Library and Information Studies, died May 16. McCarthy served as president of the New England Library Association and School Librarians of Rhode Island, as well as chair of the Rhode Island Coalition of Library Advocates. She frequently published and presented on teaching and learning in libraries.
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Eugene L. Mittelgluck, 90, who had served as director of Mount Vernon (N.Y.) Public Library and New Rochelle (N.Y.) Public Library, died April 21. As director of New Rochelle Public Library, he oversaw construction of a new main library that won an American Institute of Architects and ALA Award of Excellence for Library Architecture in 1980. After retirement, he served as interim manager at Bronxville (N.Y.) Public Library and as a librarian at Yonkers (N.Y.) Public Library.
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James Ruwaldt, 49, a library technician at the Library of Congress, died December 24.
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Rosemary Anne Young Singh, 75, who worked at Manitowoc (Wis.) Public Library and the Main and Mathematics libraries at University of Illinois Urbana–Champaign, died January 21.
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Henrietta M. Smith, 98, professor emerita at University of South Florida, died April 21. Smith edited four editions of The Coretta Scott King Awards, ALA’s publication that profiles winning books and their authors and artists. She received the 2008 Association for Library Service to Children Distinguished Service Award, the 2011 Coretta Scott King–Virginia Hamilton Award for Lifetime Achievement, and the 2014 Carle Honors award from the Eric Carle Museum of Picture Book Art.
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Lisa Harper Wood, 64, director of Keller (Tex.) Public Library from 1987 to 2007, died April 27. She also served as director of Richland Hills (Tex.) Public Library for five years and was named Library Director of the Year in 1994 by the Texas Municipal League.