Herman Fussler

Herman Fussler (1914 - 1997) was a distinguished US librarian.

Herman FusslerUniversity of Chicago Photographic Archive

Life

Herman Fussler was born on May 15, 1914 in Philadelphia. He received his baccalaureate degree, with a major in mathematics, from the University of North Carolina in 1935 and an AB degree in library science in 1936. After graduation he was a summer substitute at the New York Public Library. Beginning in high school, and continuing through college, Fussler had served as a student assistant in the Department of Physics at the University of North Carolina. Working with spectroscopic photography in the physics lab, he became interested in photography in general and microphotography in particular. Fussler's interest in this new technology attracted the attention of M. Llewellyn Raney, Director of the University of Chicago Library, who appointed Fussler to develop a new microphotographic laboratory, an experimental and testing facility as well as a producer of film, starting October 1936. The microphotography laboratory flourished and Fussler led an exhibit on microphotography at the World Congress of Universal Documentation in Paris in 1937.

Fussler earned an MA at the University of Chicago in 1941 with a thesis published as Photographic reproduction in libraries and a PhD in 1948 with a study of literature use by chemists and physicists. He taught regularly throughout his career. He was appointed science librarian in 1941 and soon thereafter management of the library resources of the Manhatten Project, located at the university.

He became Assistant Director, then Associate Director, and in 1948 Director of the Library. He transferred to the Graduate Library School in 1971 following completion of the very large Joseph L. Regenstein library and retired in 1986. He died on March 2, 1997 in Raleigh, North Carolina.

Contributions

Fussler did pioneering work in microphotography and library automation. As director of the University of Chicago Library from 1948-1971 he helped create the very large Joseph Regenstein Library building. He was one of the founders of the Mid-West Inter-Library Center (later Center for Research Libraries) in 1949, a central collection storage facility for a national consortium of large research libraries.

He was associate editor of the Journal of Documentary Reproduction, 1938-1942, and founding associate editor of its successor American Documentation (later Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology).

Publications

A detailed list of Fussler's publications through 1980 is in Shera (1983, 245-253). Numerous publications are listed in Google Scholar. [1]

• Photographic reproduction for libraries: A study in administrative problems. University of Chicago Press, 1941.
• "The bibliographer working in a broad area of knowledge." College & Research Libraries 10, no. 3 (1949): 199–202. [2]
• "Characteristics of the research literature used by chemists and physicists in the United States." The Library Quarterly 19, no. 1 (1949): 19-35 & 19, no. 2 (1949): 119-143.
• "Photographic Reproduction of Research Materials." Library Trends 2, no 4 (Spring 1954): 532-544. [3]
• Patterns in the use of books in large research libraries. [With Julian L. Simon.] University of Chicago Press, 1969. Also a small preliminary ed., 1961.
• "Contemporary issues in bibliographic control." With K. Kocher. The Library Quarterly 47, no. 3 (1977): 237-252.

Offices

• Fussler received presidential appointments to the Board of Regents of the National Library of Medicine (1963) and the National Advisory Committee on Libraries (1966).
• Member of the advisory committee to the Librarian of Congress on the study of automation in the Library of Congress.

Awards

• American Library Association. Melvil Dewey Medal, 1954; Ralph R. Shaw Award for library literature, 1976.
• Association of College and Research Librarians. Distinguished Career Citation, 1989.
• American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Fellow.
• American Association for the Advancement of Science. Fellow.
• University of Chicago. Martin A. Ryerson Distinguished Service Professor in the Graduate Library School, 1974.

Further reading

• Jones, William G. "Fussler, Herman Howe (1914-1997)." Dictionary of American library biography: Second supplement. Donald G. Davis, ed.Westport, CT: Libraries Unlimited, 1978, pp 98-102.
• Herman Howe Fussler." Obituary. Libra University of Chicago Library. (Spring-Summer 1997) [4]
• The Library Quarterly 53, no 3 (July 1983): 213-393 is a special issue about Herman H. Fussler, including a biography by Jesse H. Shera, Jesse H. "Herman Howe Fussler." on pp 215-253.

Papers

• University of Chicago Library, Hanna Holborn Gray Special Collections Research Center. Fussler, Herman Howe. Papers.

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