biography
| name: |
Jewett, Charles Coffin
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| sex:
| male
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| lived:
| (1816–68)
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| biography:
| Librarian and bibliographer, born in Lebanon, Maine, USA. He studied at Brown University (1835) and became the school's first academic librarian. In 1843 he published a Catalogue of the Library of Brown University, and this led to his appointment as first librarian of the Smithsonian Institution. At the Smithsonian much of his work was devoted to developing methods of cataloguing the holdings of various libraries, with an ultimate goal (never realized) of producing a national union catalogue of all the libraries in the country. His hopes to make the Smithsonian primarily into a reference library brought him into conflict with the Secretary, Joseph Henry, and Jewett left Washington (1854) to become librarian and then superintendent of the Boston Public Library (1855–68). Perhaps his most familiar and lasting innovation was the use of separate slips rather than a bound ledger to keep track of individual library loans. |
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