Izetta Roberts Cooper (born 1929) is a Liberian librarian and writer. [1]
Izetta Roberts was born on October 13, 1929. Her father, the Liberian Senator Isaac Roberts, had died earlier that year. She attended St Teresa Convent elementary school, followed by high school at the College of West Africa, where she graduated with a Diploma in 1948. She proceeded to Boston University, graduating with a B.Sc. in education in 1954. She married the doctor Henry Nehemiah Cooper on 11 July 1953. [2] She then completed an M.S. in library science from Case Western Reserve University in 1955. [3]
After completing library training, Cooper worked in the library of Fisk University, [4] before returning to Liberia to become Librarian at the University of Liberia. She also served as consultant for President William Tubman's Presidential Library. From 1978 to 1980 she hosted and produced a Liberian TV show called The World of Books. [1]
After Cooper met the African-American quilting expert Kyra E. Hicks in the Washington, D.C., area in 2008, the pair collaborated on Liberia: a visit through books, a bibliography of Liberia combined with Cooper's autobiographical reminiscences. [1]
Nellallitea "Nella" Larsen was an American novelist. Working as a nurse and a librarian, she published two novels, Quicksand (1928) and Passing (1929), and a few short stories. Though her literary output was scant, she earned recognition by her contemporaries.
Cynthia Rylant is an American author and librarian. She has written more than 100 children's books, including works of fiction, nonfiction, and poetry. Several of her books have won awards, including her novel Missing May, which won the 1993 Newbery Medal, and A Fine White Dust, which was a 1987 Newbery Honor book. Two of her books are Caldecott Honor Books.
The College of West Africa is a Methodist high school in Monrovia, Liberia. The school was opened in 1839 as the Monrovia Seminary, making it one of the oldest European-style schools in Africa. It has produced many of Liberia's leaders. Alumni include Liberian President Ellen Johnson Sirleaf, the first woman elected as president in an African state, and current Liberian President Joseph Boakai.
Milton Nathaniel Barnes is a Liberian diplomat, politician and member of the Liberian Destiny Party (LDP). In early 2022, he announced his intention to run as an independent candidate in the 2023 Liberian presidential election.
Alexander Crummell was an American minister and academic. Ordained as an Episcopal priest in the United States, Crummell went to England in the late 1840s to raise money for his church by lecturing about American slavery. Abolitionists supported his three years of study at Cambridge University, where Crummell developed concepts of pan-Africanism and was the school's first recorded Black student and graduate.
The University of Liberia is a publicly funded institution of higher learning located in Monrovia, Liberia. Authorized by the national government in 1851, the university opened in 1862 as Liberia College. UL has four campuses: the Capitol Hill Campus in Monrovia, the Fendall campus in Louisiana, outside Monrovia, the Medical School Campus in Congo Town, and the Straz-Sinje Campus in Sinje Grand Cape Mount County. The university enrolls approximately 18,000 students and is one of the oldest institutions of higher learning in West Africa. It is accredited by the Liberian Commission on Higher Education.
Dorothy Louise Porter Wesley was a librarian, bibliographer and curator, who built the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University into a world-class research collection. She was the first African American to receive a library science degree from Columbia University. Porter published numerous bibliographies on African American history. When she realized that the Dewey Decimal System had only two classification numbers for African Americans, one for slavery and one for colonization, she created a new classification system that ordered books by genre and author.
Fiona Kelleghan is an American academic and critic specializing in science fiction and fantasy. She was a metadata librarian and a cataloguer at the University of Miami's Otto G. Richter Library. She left the university in 2011.
Robert Bingham Downs was an American writer and librarian. Downs was an advocate for intellectual freedom, and spent the majority of his career working against literary censorship. Downs authored many books and publications regarding the topics of censorship, and on the topics of responsible and efficient leadership in the library context.
Virginia Lacy Jones was an American librarian who throughout her 50-year career in the field pushed for the integration of public and academic libraries. She was one of the first African Americans to earn a PhD in Library Science and became dean of Atlanta University's School of Library Sciences.
Sir Frank Chalton Francis was an English academic librarian and curator. Almost all his working life was at the British Museum, first as an Assistant Keeper in the Department of Printed Books, and later as Secretary of the museum, Keeper of Printed Books and, from 1959 to 1968, Director and Principal Librarian of the museum.
Ralph Robert Shaw was a librarian, a publisher, and an innovator in library science. In 1999, American Libraries named him one of the "100 Most Important Leaders We Had in the 20th Century". He was awarded the Melvil Dewey Medal in 1953 and American Library Association Honorary Membership in 1971.
Kyra E. Hicks is an American author, quilter and quilt historian. She writes about African-American quilt history and encouraging quilt documentation. She has created story quilts, such as Black Barbie, which is in the permanent collection of the Fenimore Art Museum in New York City.
Carolyn L. Mazloomi is an American curator, quilter, author, art historian, and aerospace engineer. She is a strong advocate for presenting and documenting African-American-made quilts. Her own quilts are designed to tell complex stories around African-American heritage and contemporary experiences.
David Anton Randall was an American book dealer, librarian and bibliographic scholar. He was head of Scribner's rare book department from 1935 to 1956, librarian of the Lilly Library and Professor of Bibliography at Indiana University. Randall was responsible for the sale of two copies of the Gutenberg Bible. As a practitioner of bibliology with a bibliophiliac addiction, a raconteur of history of books, and an avid collector, he developed a keen appreciation for books as physical objects—including the tasks of collecting, cataloging, finding and preserving them.
Fatima Massaquoi-Fahnbulleh was a Liberian writer and academic. After completing her education in the United States, she returned to Liberia in 1946, making significant contributions to the cultural and social life of the country.
Martha Ann Harris Ricks was an Americo-Liberian woman among the early colonists to the Colony of Liberia. Born into slavery in Tennessee, she was freed by her father, George Erskine and emigrated at age 13 with him and her family to Liberia in 1830.
Jane Elizabeth Norton was an English librarian and bibliographer, bibliographer of Edward Gibbon and editor of his correspondence.
Jane Rose Waring Roberts emigrated as a child with her free African-American family to the Colony of Liberia, where she was educated and grew up as a member of the Americo-Liberian community.
Frances Neel Cheney was an American librarian, professor, and prolific reviewer of reference books. She graduated from Vanderbilt University and served in a number of professional positions at the school, including as an instructor at the Peabody Library School. She also worked for the Library of Congress and the Japan Library School at Keio University. She is best known as the author of the "Current Reference Books" column in the Wilson Library Bulletin, which she wrote for thirty years, as well as for her textbook, Fundamental Reference Sources, that became a standard in the field. She is remembered as one of the foremost reviewers of reference books and a significant figure in the history of reference instruction.