Home | Business News | Browse by Publication | N | Notes

Anna Harriet Heyer, an isolated pioneer.

Article Excerpt
Anna Harriet Heyer (1909-2002) first achieved profession-wide recognition in 1957 with the publication of her groundbreaking bibliography, Historical Sets, Collected Editions, and Monuments of Music: A Guide to their Contents (Chicago: American Library Association). Previously, she had been recognized by a small cadre of colleagues located largely in New York: Richard Angell, who taught the first music library course at Columbia University; Catharine Keyes Miller, who succeeded him; and Otto Kinkeldey, then librarian at Cornell University. Doubtless she was not the only person influenced by Kinkeldey's 1937 article in the ALA Bulletin, (1) which offered the first guidelines for appropriate education for music librarianship; beyond his influence on her education, he redesigned her Historical Sets to reflect post-World War II needs and aided in its compilation. Except for those distant colleagues, she worked in isolation, the only music librarian in Texas, indeed that part of the country.

Anna Harriet Heyer was born in Little Rock, Arkansas, 30 August 1909. Her mother, Harriet Gates Heyer, born in Dallas, Texas, and raised in Cincinnati, Ohio, was a graduate of the University of Cincinnati--a Latin and Greek major--and the library school at Western Reserve University. Her father, Arthur W. Heyer, born and raised in Cincinnati, also a graduate of the University of Cincinnati, was a civil engineer. During Heyer's childhood the family moved around the Midwest, finally settling in Fort Worth, Texas, in 1924. After graduating from high school, Heyer entered a local university, Texas Christian University (TCU). There, influenced by an excellent high school math teacher, she was a math major with a piano minor. (2) Upon graduation in 1930, her excellence in the math program brought a TCU scholarship for additional study. Using the provisions of the scholarship, she took additional courses during the academic year 1930-31. In the fall of 1931 she became an elementary school teacher in the Fort Worth schools. She and an art teacher exchanged schools daily so that students had music one day, art the next. Heyer disliked the impermanence of her situation and described the experience as "a difficult year." (3)

Doubtless influenced by her librarian mother, fall 1932 found her in the library science program at the University of Illinois. (4) After graduation in June of 1933, she returned to Fort Worth where she chose to rest awhile; "I really didn't want to work...." (5) But by January 1934, she was ready to begin, as a temporary librarian, building up a library in a Fort Worth school. The next four years she was a high school librarian in the school system. During those years she nurtured her musical interests by studying organ and participating in a musical club. But Otto Kinkeldey's 1937 article in the ALA Bulletin changed her focus.

Kinkeldey's article--actually the publication of his talk before the first joint ALA/MLA meeting, New York City, 1937--detailed his concept of the appropriate education for music librarianship, a specialization which had not occurred to Heyer: "I didn't know about it...." Kinkeldey's description of music librarianship "appealed to me because I thought ... it would give me a chance to be within an interest that I like and still do library work." (6) Inspired by Kinkeldey's words, Heyer traveled to Columbia University the summer of 1938 to take Angell's course, "Music Library Administration," the first time it was offered. She stayed on at Columbia for the academic year 1938-39, earning an M.S. in...

View this article FREE - Now for a Limited Time, try Goliath Business News
Free for 3 Days!