By this time, many readers of this list will already have learned the
sad news that Anita Lowry, the original organizer of the electronic text
service at Columbia and of the Information Arcade at the University of
Iowa, died twelve days ago while recovering from open heart surgery.
The news came in the middle of the CETH summer seminar on electronic
texts, and gave me a great shock.  Anita helped teach the seminar last
year and had been scheduled to help teach again this year; it is hard to
think that she won't be back next year.
 
I didn't know Anita intimately, but as our paths have continued to cross
in these last few years, I have come to regard her in the way one might
a favorite cousin.  A conference or a committee meeting with Anita was
always an improvement over the same meeting without her.  She paid
attention, she spoke well and thoughtfully, she contributed
constructively to discussion.  Some of her friends used to tease her
about the name Information Arcade (are there flashing marquees over the
door? we used to ask; do they make you wear a clown nose to work?); she
would return the teasing in kind, giving as good as she got.  One of the
drawbacks of Iowa City, she used to say, was that after New York it was
kind of quiet.  So she used to come to Chicago from time to time, for a
fix of museums, concerts, and so on.  It's a long drive:  six hours from
Iowa City.  It would be one thing, she'd say, if I had to drive six
hours to get into New York.  Not great, maybe, but for some things you
have to be willing to pay a price.  But ... you drive six hours, and
when you get there, it's only Chicago?
 
It will be hard not to miss her when next I attend a meeting of the
Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) work group on electronic
texts, or when next summer's CETH seminar comes around again.
 
Anita was one of my favorite librarians, because she was a sterling
example of that profession at its finest, adjusting to the challenge of
new media without losing sight of fundamental library values and
traditions.  She knew that libraries are institutions for the
preservation and distribution of information and our cultural memory,
not just warehouses for books.  She had a clear view of what those
traditional functions mean when the cultural memory is being preserved
not in books but in electronic resources.  And she was able to
articulate clearly and persuasively just how libraries can set about the
work of taking up those functions, acquiring the necessary expertise,
and integrating the required new activities into the growing organism of
the library.
 
One of Anita's great gifts, I have always thought, was her ability to
explain electronic texts and what they mean for libraries in terms that
most librarians can understand, without blurring the edges, without
compromising, but also without threatening or frightening her audience.
She did this not only in her talks and papers but -- equally important
-- in her successful organization of electronic text services at
Columbia and Iowa.  The organizations she built provide concrete
examples of how libraries can offer access to electronic resources and
continue to support teaching and research in the university, even when
teaching and research move away from paper and onto the local or the
global network.  She did not build them alone, to be sure, and the
credit goes not just to Anita but to the staff she put together and the
library and university administrations who gave her what she needed to
get the job done.  But as far as an outsider could judge, it was Anita
who built the staff, Anita who gave shape to the plan, and Anita who
found ways to describe it in terms that gained and kept the support of
her administration.
 
The services Anita built have provided models for other libraries to
observe and imitate -- they have made much easier the task of imagining
for ourselves, or explaining to a university librarian or administrator,
just what it would mean for a library to come to terms with electronic
resources.  And so Anita's debtors include not only those of us who knew
her and were glad to work with her on committees or projects, but also
many people, present and future, who never met her and do not know her
name.
 
Everyone with any interest in electronic texts -- in particular those of
us who hope to see electronic resources integrated into our university
libraries along with the rest of our cultural heritage -- has suffered a
painful blow with Anita's death, and will have reason to miss her for a
long time.
 
 
-C. M. Sperberg-McQueen