Edith Guerrier (lower left in picture): Sept. 20, 1870 – Nov. 15, 1958

In We Pledged Allegiance: a librarian's intimate story of the United States Food Administration, Guerrier (1941) wrote: "Public libraries are the possession of the people. To justify claim to this statement librarians must not be merely keepers of the archives; they must enter into the daily lives of the people to the extent of furnishing timely material related to daily living” (p. 1).

CONTRIBUTIONS TO REFERENCE RESEARCH

Guerrier is noted for her work in making government documents accessible to libraries throughout the country. Beginning with her service in the National Food Administration during World War I, Guerrier worked tirelessly to compile government information sources and pushed legislation to establish information centers within the federal government. She also conducted one of the earliest quantitive studies of reference work in 1935.

EDUCATIONAL BACKGROUND

Guerrier graduated with Honors from Vermont Methodist Seminary and Female College in 1891 and enrolled later that year in the Museum School of the Boston Museum of Fine Arts. In 1892, she left that school for a job at the day nursery at the North Bennet Street Industrial School but for a time continued taking art classes several nights a week.

PROFESSIONAL DETAILS

When World War I began, Guerrier signed up for volunteer work that led to her establishment of the Food Facts Information Bureau for Boston’s War Service Committee. The collection she amassed ranged from wheat- and sugar-free recipes to general conservation tips. When she received no response to several requests for government publications on the topics, Guerrier went in person to the nation’s capital and was ultimately offered a job (Matson, 1992). As chief of the library section of Herbert Hoover’s National Food Administration, she also started “Food News Notes for Librarians,” a series of bulletins, largely devoted to eliminating waste, that was sent to 8,000 libraries across the country (Matson, 1992).

Guerrier’s work with the Food Administration ended in after 16 months with the end of the war, but her dedication to publicizing government reference sources did not. She successfully argued for and authored a series of government newssheets that were eventually published as a book, The Federal Executive Departments as Sources of Information for Libraries (Matson, 1992). The book, which appears to be a forerunner of the Government Manual, was used as a supplemental textbook in documents classes at several library schools (Clark & Richardson, 2001). Guerrier would also spend the next nine years lobbying, via intermittent articles and speeches, for the passage of a bill she authored that would establish a national service to keep librarians informed about government publications (Guerrier, 1941).

Upon her return to Boston in 1919, she was named supervisor of circulation in Boston, where she established a reference room that included more than 1,000 government publications. Her 1921 role with the Subcommittee on the Popular Use of Documents in Public Libraries of the Committee on Public Documents led to one of the first known studies of how government publications were being used in libraries (Clark & Richardson, 2001). She later became the first female supervisor of branch libraries of the Boston Public Library (Matson, 1992) and continued her extensive studies of reference work and the utility of various reference sources. Among her findings in a 1935 study were that librarians spent one-fifth of their time answering reference questions, and that half of those questions could be answered using encyclopedias, dictionaries, atlases, the World Almanac, Statesman's Yearbook, Reader's Guide, Who's Who in America, Who's Who, and debate and quotation books. The study of 33 metropolitan libraries found that another 80 reference sources answered another third of the questions (Clark & Richardson, 2001).

After a forced retirement in 1940 at the age of 70, Guerrier volunteered in the library of the Massachusetts Committee on Public Safety, where she continued her reference work by collecting emergency preparedness and disaster response literature. In 1941, she wrote We Pledged Allegiance, A Librarian’s Intimate Story of the United States Food Administration, which was the first title of the Hoover Library Series of Miscellaneous Publications on War, Revolution and Peace (Guerrier, 1941).

OTHER CONTRIBUTIONS

Guerrier and her partner of 40 years, Edith Brown, are perhaps most well-known for their founding of the Paul Revere Pottery, which began with Guerrier’s work with the young women in Boston’s North End (Matson, 1992). Guerrier, who was the granddaughter of an abolitionist and the daughter of an English immigrant, wanted to Americanize the young female immigrants who made up her “Saturday Evening Girls” and other social clubs and expose them to high culture through storytelling and plays for young women. It was unusual among the clubs of the time in that it mixed girls from different ethnic backgrounds (Clark & Richardson, 2001). From these experiences and because of a desire to find employment for women with better working conditions for women, the Paul Revere Pottery was born, pieces of which remain collector’s items today (Matson, 1992).

In conclusion, Guerrier left a lasting legacy that changed the face of library services in the early 20th century, particularly in relation to the role of government information. From her relentless enthusiasm for documents librarianship and reference research, Guerrier was a leader in a profession that was at that time still dominated by men.

SEE ALSO

Government Publications

Reference Collection (Size)

The Reference Librarian

SOURCES

Guerrier, E. (1941). We pledged allegiance: a librarian's intimate story of the United States Food Administration. Stanford University, Calif. : Stanford University Press.

Clark, K, & Richardson, J. (2001). “A little [warrior] woman of New England” on behalf of public policy [Electronic version]. Journal of Government Information, 28(3), 267-283.

Matson, M. (Ed.)(1992), An Independent Woman: The Autobiography of Edith Guerrier, foreword by Polly Welts Kaufman. Amherst: The University of Massachusetts Press.

Gretchen L. Hoffman