Lois Mai Chan
Our post today comes from Melissa Freiley, an LIS student at the University of North Texas and the library cataloging technician at Denton (TX) Indepedent School District.
“I get the biggest satisfaction from teaching,” Dr. Lois Mai Chan declared when asked about her greatest achievement in this 2014 video created by the Chinese American Librarians Association (CALA). From 1970 until 2011, Chan influenced hundreds of future catalogers as she taught cataloging at the University of Kentucky (UK) School of Library and Information Science in Lexington. But this wasn’t all she did.
Born on July 30, 1934, in Taiwan, Chan studied foreign languages at National Taiwan University and went on to earn a Master of Arts at Florida State University. In 1966, Chan began working at UK as a serials cataloger. She joined the faculty of the then-UK College of Library Science in 1970, and in 1980 became a full professor after obtaining her Ph.D. in comparative literature at UK.
Dr. Chan had a deep impact on cataloging and classification. Not only did she teach hundreds of future librarians during her forty-five years at UK, but she also wrote over sixty research articles and published over twenty books throughout her career, including the popular textbook Cataloging and Classification: An Introduction, now in its fourth edition. In 1989 she earned the Margaret Mann Citation, “the highest honor in cataloging bestowed by the American Library Association,” which has been given annually since 1951. [We just published a post about Margaret Mann, for whom the citation is named, earlier this month! --ed.] CALA awarded her the CALA Distinguished Service Award in 1992 for outstanding leadership and achievement in library science at the national and/or international level. In 2006 she received the Beta Phi Mu Award for her distinguished service in library education. During her career, she also served as a consultant to the Library of Congress and OCLC’s Faceted Application of Subject Terminology project.
Dr. Chan died on August 20, 2014, but her legacy lives on through the newly-created Lois Mai Chan Professional Development Grant, established by the Cataloging and Metadata Management Section (CaMMS) of the Association for Library Collections & Technical Services (ALCTS) in 2017. The grant seeks to assist library workers from under-represented groups who are new to the metadata field in attending the American Library Association Annual Conference. The UK Lois Mai Chan Enrichment Fund also seeks to honor Chan’s legacy by providing assistance to UK students studying library science.
Dr. Chan may have believed that luck was the reason for her success, but her hard work and passion for library science and teaching are undeniable and inspiring.
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