Winifred (Win) Emma Sewell, 1917–2002

Winifred (Win) Emma Sewell, a long-time member of MLA, died at her home in Cabin John, Maryland, on October 23, 2002. Though eighty-five years old and officially retired, Win continued to review daily the professional literature and to mentor the students and practicing librarians and information professionals who sought her counsel. Many of them can recount stories of her generosity and intelligence and of the creativity that permeated her life.

Early years

A native of Newport, Washington, Win received her library degree from Columbia University in 1940 and then served as librarian in its Modern Language Reading Room. She augmented her education with science courses, especially in chemistry and, in 1942, became the librarian for the Wellcome Research Laboratories. Win clearly saw the library as “part of the intensive cooperative effort to find large-scale manufacturing methods for [penicillin] because it was desperately needed for the war effort” [1]. This observation—that of the library's active partnership with the research staff to meet the institutional mission—remained at the core of her information service philosophy.

In 1946, Win moved to the Squibb Institute for Medical Research. There, she focused on indexing the literature, which honed her belief that librarians need to maintain close relationships with the scientific community to understand and obtain the publications they need. She joined NLM in 1961 as deputy chief and subject heading specialist in the Bibliographic Services Division. Her work was instrumental in the development of MEDLARS, and she was considered by many as an information pioneer. From 1965 to 1970, she headed NLM's Drug Literature Program.

Consultant and teacher

In 1970, Win formally moved to the world of consulting and teaching. Appointed adjunct assistant professor of pharmacy at the University of Maryland, she taught information skills to pharmacy students, and she trained scores of health sciences librarians in its College of Library and Information Science. Win's students universally agreed that she held strong beliefs and standards about accuracy, quality control, and the need to understand reference service from the end users' point of view.

Association activities and professional contributions

Win served as president of the Special Libraries Association (SLA) in 1960/61 and as president of the Drug Information Association a decade later. She helped organize MLA's Public Health/Health Administration Section, serving as its chair in 1979. She spearheaded a Core Public Health Journals List for MLA after successfully starting one on drugs for the American Pharmacy Association. Win was also a prolific writer, alone or with others, as author, editor, or compiler of a number of books and journal articles [2–5]. Her Guide to Drug Information [6] won her MLA's Eliot Prize in 1977, and, in 1984, she agreed to be interviewed for MLA's Oral History Project [7].

Honors and awards

In 1979, the Philadelphia College of Pharmacy and Science conferred on Win the honorary degree of doctor of science. She was made a Fellow of MLA in 1978, and the American Association for the Advancement of Science conferred a similar honor on her in 1995. In 1998, she was inducted into the SLA Hall of Fame and, a year later, served as honorary president of the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy during its centennial; she was the first woman and first librarian so honored. That same year (1999), SLA created the Winifred Sewell Prize for Innovation in Information Technologies in Biomedical and Life Sciences Librarianship.

A master cultivator

Win was a “master cultivator.” She enjoyed gardening, a passion outside librarianship for which she was well known. Her attention to preparing and harvesting her land was mirrored in her attention to preparing, improving, and refining the skills of her library school students, many of whom became her research partners. According to Webster's dictionary, “cultivate” also means “to seek to become familiar with” [8]. Win believed “librarians who work for biomedical scientists and practitioners must learn and understand the practices and needs of their clientele subjectively rather than just intellectually from reading or observing from the library perspective” [9]. Thus, Win decided her legacy would be a fund for librarians to attend national client meetings and to work for six to twelve months in the “environment of their clients, working to identify with and further the goals of the health information professionals hosts” [10].

Win provided stipends for librarians to attend the annual meetings of the American Association of Colleges of Pharmacy (1997 through 2002) and the American Public Health Association (2001 and 2002). She established the Grace and Harold Sewell Memorial Trust Fund to administer these grants and, in typical fashion, personally selected its Board of Trustees to represent both the library and client communities.

A person's degree or professional affiliation did not limit Win's view of his or her role in health information delivery. She envisioned a future in which community health workers as well as librarians and other practitioners would be considered integral members of the health team. In 2001, Win funded two clinic workers to attend the American Public Health Association annual meeting to present a report on their HIV health-information outreach project.

Illness did not seem to faze her. Everything was secondary to her work. The only thing that seemed to upset her was having work interrupted. She fiercely prized her independence and her intellect. Win seemed satisfied with her accomplishments, though she had many more projects in mind. Through the trust fund and the librarians she cultivated, Win's philosophy will endure:

Librarians should be advocates for end users to the traditional library staff, assisting the latter in identifying with the clients and gaining a “We” rather than a “They” perspective. [11]