Edwin Hatfield Anderson was an American librarian. He was the director of both the Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh and the New York Public Library.
Background
Edwin Hatfield Anderson was born on September 27, 1861 in Zionsville, Indiana, United States, the seventh of the ten children of Philander and Emma Amanda (Duzan) Anderson. His father, a physician, was a Pennsylvanian of Scottish ancestry; his mother, of French descent, was a native of Tennessee. The Andersons, strict Presbyterians, named their son for a minister of that denomination, Edwin Hatfield. An older brother, Albert Barnes Anderson (named for the Rev. Albert Barnes), became a federal district court judge. During Edwin's childhood the family moved to Anthony, Kansas.
Education
Anderson completed his public school education in Anthony, Kansas. He then entered Wabash College in Crawfordsville, Indiana--his father's alma mater--in 1879 and graduated four years later with a Bachelor of Arts degree.
Anderson once said that he decided to become a librarian while in college, but it was not until the fall of 1890 that he entered the pioneering New York State Library School at Albany, New York, which had been founded shortly before by Melvil Dewey. He spent the intervening years reading law, writing for a Sunday school paper and for Chicago newspapers, and teaching school in Chicago. At Albany he worked part-time in the library of the Y. M. C. A. to help pay his expenses. Family needs called him home in May 1891 before the completion of his first year of study, but he had managed to attend many of the lectures given before the second-year or senior class.
He received honorary degrees from Carnegie Institute of Technology, New York University, Wabash College, and Columbia.
Career
Anderson's career as a professional librarian began in June 1891 when he was hired by the Newberry Library in Chicago as a cataloguer.
Anderson remained at the Newberry through April 1892, and in the following month became librarian of the Carnegie Free Library, Braddock, Pennsylvania, the second of the many public libraries set up with funds given by Andrew Carnegie.
In 1895 he was called to Pittsburgh to organize that city's Carnegie Library. There, over the next nine years, Anderson planned the new library, even designing many of the furnishings and arrangements. He assembled a remarkable staff, organized strong departments for children and for the study of science and technology, and developed a system of branch libraries.
In 1900, again through the generosity of Carnegie, he established a training school for children's librarians which was to become pre-eminent in its field. It later became the Carnegie Library School, affiliated with the Carnegie Institute of Technology.
Anderson left library work in 1904 to become a partner in a zinc and lead mining enterprise at Carthage, Missouri. He returned to his profession two years later, however, as director of the New York State Library and Library School in Albany, succeeding Melvil Dewey.
In 1908 he moved to New York City as assistant director of the New York Public Library. He became director in May 1913, succeeding John Shaw Billings.
In 1911, again with funds given by Carnegie, Anderson organized a library school at the New York Public Library (with Mary Wright Plummer as principal), which trained many of the future leading experts in the reference and circulation work of the period. He later (1926) took an active part in organizing the School of Library Service of Columbia University, formed through the consolidation of the New York State Library School and the Library School of the New York Public Library.
Anderson retired as director of the New York Public Library in 1934, at the age of seventy-three. He had lived in Scarsdale, New York, during much of the time he was with the library and ascribed his exceptionally good health to his regular cross-country walks in Westchester County. He had long maintained a summer home in Dorset, Vermont, and it became his permanent address until the last year of his life, when he and his wife moved to a new home in Williamsburg, Virginia.
Anderson died of a coronary thrombosis in 1947 while on a visit to one of his daughters in Evanston, Illinois, and was cremated, without service or burial.
Achievements
Personality
Anderson was a handsome, genial man, full of humorous stories which he told with gusto, but he was reticent about his personal life and reserved in his statements about library policy. Because of his strong distaste for personal publicity, he was little known outside his profession.
Connections
On December 22, 1891 Anderson married Frances R. Plummer of Glencoe, Illinois, a sister of the librarian Mary Wright Plummer. The couple had no children of their own, but after World War I adopted two French girls, Cecile and Charlotte.