PEOPLE
Peter Lewis P
eter Lewis died on 28 April. Starting in 1947 as assis- tant in a public library, after military service, Peter Lewis’s career took him to almost every type of library and ended with his retirement as Director General of Bibliographic Services in the British Library in 1989.
He gained his Associateship and Fellowship of the Library Association through part-time study in posts in Brighton, (where he met his wife, June, to whom he was married for 65 years until her death earlier this year), Plymouth and Chester public librar- ies. He found his professional feet in 1955 at the Board of Trade Library in Whitehall.
Peter wrote Literature of the Social Sciences: an introduc- tory study and guide (LA, 1960). He became the LA’s Senior Examiner in Bibliography & Book Selection for the Fellowship, and later chaired its Board of Fellowship. He also chaired the editorial board of the Journal of Librarianship and sat on the editorial board of the Journal of Documentation. He was a founder member of the LA Cataloguing & Indexing Group. With his friend Joel Downing of the BNB and others, he was active in promoting the adoption of the 1967 Anglo-American Cataloguing Rules (AACR).
While at the Board of Trade Library, he was invited to join the LA Committee formulating the Rules for Descriptive Catalogu- ing, an extension of the Anglo-American Cataloguing Code of 1908. In 1965 he went as Lecturer to the new School of Library & Information Studies at Queen’s University Belfast. With the then University Librarian Peter Havard Williams at the helm, the School was innovative in providing courses leading to Associate of the Library Association for both non-graduate and graduate students.
His main field of teaching and research was bibliography and bibliographic control. He got his MA at Queen’s for his survey of the systematic uses of the British National Bibliography (BNB) in UK libraries. In 1969, Peter was appointed University Librarian at City University in London, then but a few years old as a university. In 1972 he moved again, to be Librarian at the University of Sussex.
In 1975, a Joint Steering Committee was established to create a second edition of AACR in one text. Peter was invited by the British Library to represent it on the committee, and was elected Chair, with Michael Gorman, then at BNB, as Editor. He received the Margaret Mann Citation from the American Library Association for his work on AACR. In 1980 he was appointed Director General of the British Library’s Bibliographic Services Division (BSD), created by its absorption of the British National Bibliography, which had been set up primarily by the LA in 1950 under A. J Wells to create and publish bibliographic records of the printed publications of British and Irish publishers acquired under Legal Deposit. He and June moved to Wenhaston, a small village near Hales- worth in Suffolk, where he plunged into social life: amateur dramatics choral singing; editor and publisher of the Millennial village history and editor of a twelve-parish magazine and of the village newsletter; heath and forest walks with their two retrievers and was a devoted grandfather to his two grand- daughters.
Tim Lewis Son
Former ALA President, Michael Gorman, Chicago, adds: As chair of the Joint Steering Committee for the Revision of AACR, Peter not only navigated the extraordinarily complex and competing strains of North American and British catalogu- ing traditions and interests and the entrenched views of major institutions, particularly those of the Library of Congress, but did so with great tact and good humour winning the respect and affection of all involved. His Preface to AACR2 gives details of the multi-year nego- tiations between the national libraries and national library associations involved but can only hint at the inter-personal stresses and strains that heavily influenced those negotiations. As Editor of AACR2, I was and remain deeply grateful for Peter Lewis’s guidance, assistance, and friendship during those years. Peter was a good man and a doughty colleague who never lost his senses of proportion or humour while always standing his ground. The library profession and the cataloguing community in particular owe him a debt of gratitude and should salute his memory.
Gillian Clipsham, on 23 May. Gill worked in Buckinghamshire Libraries, and was a key member of the county’s Children & Young People’s Team and the Schools Library Service. An obituary will follow.
Gil Richardson, on 6 June. Gil’s last post was as Knowledge & Information Manager at the Royal College of General Practitioners, and he retired in 2004.
Alan Poulter, on 10 June. Alan was formerly Lecturer in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at the University of Strathclyde. An obituary will follow.
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