Librarian News

Dr. Mayme Clayton has at long last found a home for "the largest collection on the West Coast of African American works in literature, music, and movies as well as photographs, manuscripts, and memorabilia."

Dr. Clayton spent 40 years while working as a librarian at USC and UCLA libraries collecting and her collection has finally found a home. The Mayme A. Clayton Library in Culver City, California (part of Los Angeles) will be a research based library and cultural center. This dream has come to fruition aided by three generations of Claytons, including Avery who is the Executive Director of Western States Black Research and Educational Center (WSBREC), which maintains the Mayme A. Clayton Collection of African Americana as well as the cross-university cooperation of Pepperdine, UCLA and USC. USC will work on digitizing the collection.

Dr. Clayton has collected some astounding items including the first published book to be authored by an African American writer, Poems on Various Subjects, Religous and Moral by Phillis Wheatley. Ms. Wheatley wrote this book in 1773 and the largest black film collection in the world. Learn more about Dr. Clayton here and here.


Sad goodbyes to Fred Kilgour. Fred Kilgour was a pioneer in the field of library databases and the "father" of OCLC-originally the Ohio College Learning Center, now Online Computer Learning Center. Mr. Kilgour passed away on July 31, 2006. He was 92.

"Most people don't realize how important librarians are. I ran across a book recently which suggested that the peace and prosperity of a culture was solely related to how many librarians it contained. Possibly a slight overstatement. But a culture that doesn't value its librarians doesn't value ideas and without ideas, well, where are we?" Neil Gaiman
(The Sandman. Line spoken by Lucien, Librarian of the Dreaming.
Submitted by Trey Bunn.)