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| Ruth Freitag, 1985 | |
Ruth Freitag, longtime research librarian at the Library of Congress, called "the librarian to the stars" by the New York Times for helping so many science and technology writers, died on October 3 at age 96. Her death became widely known only in the last few weeks.
"In a way," the Times wrote, "Ms. Freitag was her own analog version of Google, providing answers to a wide array of queries from writers and researchers in astonishing depth and detail decades before computers and the internet transformed the research process."
Among her fans and the people who relied on her were Carl Sagan and Isaac Asimov. David DeVorkin, the recently retired curator of astronomy at the National Air and Space Museum at the Smithsonian Institution, told the Times, "She was absolutely the go-to person for getting manuscript material and books."
She was also renowned in the field for compiling bibliographic guides and resources on a range of subjects. "Her crowning achievement was her illustrated, annotated, 3,235-entry bibliography on Halley's comet, replete with citations of books, journals, charts and pamphlets, as well as references in fiction, music, cartoons and paintings. It was indexed and bound and published by the Library of Congress in 1984, just in time for the celebrated comet's last pass-by of Earth in 1986. Even the Halley's Comet Society in London called Ms. Freitag for information."
Jennifer Harbster, head of the science reference section at the Library of Congress, observed: "These bibliographies would take months and even years to do. It wasn't like you just found a title and put it in your bibliography. She would annotate it all."
After graduating from Penn State in 1944, Freitag joined the Women's Army Corps and spent three years in China. She then joined the Foreign Service and was stationed in London and Hong Kong. She traveled with her mother for a time around the world, then after her mother's death earned a master's degree in library science from the University of Southern California in 1959. As the Times recounted: "The Library of Congress recruited her that year as part of its elite program for outstanding graduates of library schools. After six months of training, she joined the library as a full-time employee and stayed until she retired in 2006 at 82."