LHRT (Library History Round Table)

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Kathleen de la Peña McCook
Distinguished University Professor
School of Information
University of South Florida
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> On Dec 16, 2025, at 11:25 AM, Wayne Wiegand <wwiegandfsu@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> Colleagues:
>
> I want to encourage and applaud the “Librarians We Have Lost” initiative Kathleen started, but I also want to add a word of caution.
>
> For my History Ph.D dissertation I chose a biography of a secondary figure in the Theodore Roosevelt and William Howard Taft presidencies for several reasons: adequate body of personal and governmental primary sources to ground it; nobody had written a bio of this person before, and it was likely later to turn into a book to advance my career. But as I went into the research my dissertation advisor said: “In your portrait make sure to paint the haloes and the warts.”
>
> I have followed that advice ever since. It guided me while researching the Dewey biography, which was the fourth published in the 20th century, but the only one that addressed his racism, sexual harassment, and anti-Semiticism, which was so obvious from an analysis of his papers at Columbia University I could not understand how previous biographers overlooked it.
>
> I fully understand the desire to paint the “haloes” in any biography, but there is a cost to pay for overlooking or ignoring the “warts.”
>
> Case in point. When Marilyn Miller edited a series of biographical sketches of youth/school librarians in 2003, only two of its over fifty authors had the courage to address issues of race. Many of the subjects covered managed racially segregated systems and libraries, or taught in segregated universities.
>
> One of those authors was Jim Carmichael, whose sketch of Lucile Nix said she might have become an ALA president but for her racism. Despite this fact (certainly a “wart” in any credible biography), she was awarded the prestigious Joseph W. Lippincott Award in 1968. I could not help but wonder how Black school and youth services library leaders like Augusta Baker and Virginia Lacy Jones, who had fought the racist library practices Nix supported for decades, felt when she received that award.
>
> So back to my word of caution. If we only concentrate on the “haloes” in this series, are we laying the same kind of groundwork Marilyn Miller laid two decades ago by creating a skewed body of information that overlooks “warts” that mark significant obstacles still perplexing our profession?
>
> My last book, “In Silence or Indifference: Racism and Jim Crow Segregated Public School Libraries,” carefully documents a history of the “warts” that most of Marilyn’s authors deliberately overlooked. My Dewey experience repeated, as is the lesson I learned in 1974.
>
> I know this “word of caution” will not be welcome to many, but I urge you all to give it some thought as you craft your histories for future readers.
>
> Wayne
>


Original Message:
Sent: 12/16/2025 8:20:00 AM
From: Kathleen McCook
Subject: Frederick Wilfrid ("Wilf") Lancaster (1933 – 2013). Librarians We Have Lost-Sesquicentennial Memories - 1976-2026

Frederick Wilfrid ("Wilf")  Lancaster (1933 – 2013) was a British-American librarian and information scientist. Lancaster was a great analytical thinker and had broad intellectual influence in the late 20th century. 

F.W. Lancaster immigrated to the US in 1959 and worked as information specialist for the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland, from 1965 to 1968. He was a professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana, from 1972 to 1992 and professor emeritus from 1992 to 2013. He continued as an honored scholar after retirement speaking on the evolution of librarianship in the 20th and 21st century. He was awarded Best Information Science Book of the Year three times by the  Association for Information Science and Technology. 

Lancaster graduated as an associate of the British Library Association from the University of Northumbria at Newcastle, England, in 1955 and was named a fellow of the Library Association of Great Britain in 1969. He began his professional career as a senior assistant at the Newcastle upon-Tyne Public Libraries. He immigrated in 1959 to Akron, Ohio to become the senior librarian for science and technology at the Akron Public Library. 

Lancaster worked as the technical librarian for Babcock & Wilcox from 1960 until he returned to the U.K. in 1962 to become a senior research assistant at ASLIB in London. 
In 1964, Lancaster returned to the U.S. where he was integrally involved in the design and management of MEDLARS, the National Library of Medicine's computerized bibliographic retrieval system for articles in academic journals in medicine and allied health professions.  

Lancaster was appointed director of the biomedical librarianship program at the University of Illinois-Urbana School of Information Sciences  in 1970 where he did research and taught until 1992. He directed numerous doctoral dissertations, served on many doctoral committees and was especially supportive of international students. A list of dissertation committees on which he served is included in the 2008 Festschrift published in his honor.

Lancaster edited the journal, Library Trends, for 20 years (1986 to 2006.)

Lancaster participated in many international conferences and lecture series in Australia; Brazil; Canada; China; Colombia; Costa Rica; Denmark; Egypt; England; Finland; France; Germany; Guatemala; Hong Kong; India; Israel; Italy; Mexico; Namibia; the Netherlands; Norway; Poland; Portugal; Singapore; South Africa; Spain; Sri Lanka; Sweden; Syria; Taiwan; Tunisia; Turkey; and the West Indies. He was a Fulbright professor at the Indian Statistical Institute (1991); in Denmark at the Royal School of Librarianship, (1985); and in Brazil at the Instituto Brasileiro de Informacao em  Ciencia e Technologia.

In a family tribute Cesaria Lancaster (Maria Cesaria Volpe), who married Frederick Wilfrid Lancaster in 1961, and his six children provided warm reflections of their life together. At the time of his death, he had thirteen grandchildren.

Selected Awards 

▪ (1992) Best Information Science Book of the Year for Indexing and Abstracting in Theory and Practice (ASSIS&T) 
▪ (1988) ASIS&T Award of Merit (1988) 
▪ (1988) Inaugural recipient of "Outstanding Information Science Teacher Award " American Society for Information Science, 1980 
▪ (1981) John Brubaker Award to recognize an outstanding work of literary merit for "The Future of the Librarian Lies Outside the Library", by the Catholic Library Association. 
▪ (1979) Best Information Science Book of the Year for Information Retrieval Systems: Characteristics, Testing, and Evaluation 
▪ (1978) Best Information Science Book of the Year for Toward Paperless Information Systems (ASSIS&T) 
▪ (1974) Best Information Science Book of the Year for Information Retrieval On-line, F. Wilfrid Lancaster and E.G. Fayen.

▪ (1969) Best JASIST Paper (1969) for "MEDLARS: Report on Evaluation of its Operating Efficiency." 

Selected Publications 

• Lancaster, F. W. (Ed.). (1993). Libraries and the Future; Essays on the Library in the Twenty-First Century. New York: Haworth Press. 
• Lancaster, F. W. (1988/1993). If You Want to Evaluate Your Library. Champaign: University of Illinois, Graduate School of Library and Information Science. (1st ed. 1988, 2nd ed. 1993). 
• Lancaster, F. W. (1978). Toward Paperless Information Systems. New York: Academic Press. 
• Lancaster, F. W. & Fayen, E. G. (1973). Information Retrieval On-Line. Los Angeles: Melville Pub. Co. 
• Lancaster, F. W. (1968). Information Retrieval Systems; Characteristics, Testing, and Evaluation. New York, Wiley. 

Sources

Haricombe, Lorraine J. & Russell, Keith (eds). (2008). "The Influence of F. W. Lancaster on Information Science and on Libraries". Library Trends, 56(4). 

Haricombe, Lorraine J., and Chandra Prabha. 2008. "F. W. Lancaster as Scholar, Teacher, and Mentor: Reflections of Students". Library Trends 56 (4): 747–62. 

Frederick Lancaster.  Obituary. Renner-Wikoff Chapel. August 25, 2013. 

Lancaster, Cesaria, Children: Miriam Meyer, Owen Lancaster, Jude Lancaster, Aaron Lancaster, Lakshmi Hanumanthappa, and Raji Hanumanthappa. 2008. "F. W. Lancaster: A Family Tribute". Library Trends 56 (4): 740–46.

This entry has been submitted to the Library History Round Table  Digital Memorial-- "Librarians We Have Lost."

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Kathleen de la Peña McCook
Distinguished University Professor
School of Information
University of South Florida
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</wwiegandfsu@gmail.com>