Mary Elizabeth Feeney, better known as Betty, former director of Yale Medical Library (now the Harvey Cushing/John Hay Whitney Medical Library), died on March 17, 2000; she was eighty-one. Among the other positions she held during her career were director of the New England Regional Medical Library Service (NERMLS) at Harvard University and associate director of the library at the New York Academy of Medicine.
Betty Feeney was born in Kansas City, Missouri, on September 15, 1918. She attended the College of St. Elizabeth in Convent Station, New Jersey, and completed her bachelor's degree in English and sociology at the University of Pennsylvania in 1947, following service during World War II as a lieutenant in the U.S. Navy Women's Reserve. She participated in the Professional Training Program in Research Librarianship at the University of Pennsylvania from 1947 to 1949 and then became head of the university library's Reserve Books Department, where she served for two years.
Betty entered health sciences librarianship in 1952, as librarian at the University of Pennsylvania Hospital. In 1962, she was appointed assistant librarian at the library of the College of Physicians of Philadelphia under Elliott Morse. Two years later, she moved to a similar library, that of the New York Academy of Medicine, where she served as associate director under Gertrude Annan.
In 1970, Harold Bloomquist, director of the Countway Library of Medicine at Harvard, named her to succeed the author as director of NERMLS, and she stayed in that post until 1977. Following the departure of Stanley Truelson from Yale Medical Library, she became director of that library until her retirement in 1985. Afterward, she lived in West Hartford, Connecticut. Her closest surviving relative is a cousin.
Betty was a long-time member of the Medical Library Association and served on the Committee on Advanced Seminars and on the Committee on Continuing Education. She was also a member of the Special Libraries Association and of the Catholic Library Association. She was the assistant editor of Catholic Library World from 1956 to 1958.
Acknowledgments
I am grateful for the assistance of these persons in the compilation this obituary: Marion Levine, Regina Kenny Marone, Lucretia W. McClure, Erich Meyerhoff, and Foster Palmer. I also acknowledge taking some information from biographical reference works [1, 2].
References
- Ash L. ed. A biographical directory of librarians in the United States and Canada. 5th ed. Chicago, IL: American Library Association, 1970. [Google Scholar]
- Lee JL. ed. Who's who in library and information services. Chicago, IL: American Library Association, 1982. [Google Scholar]