Adelaide R. Hasse

"Never forget that it is the spirit with which you endow your work that makes it useful or futile. Let us always work towards the end that the compensations of librarianship may at least be honorable, and that the true spirit of workmanship may be kept alive among us."(Adelaide Hasse)

Adelaide Rosalie Hasse was born in 1868 in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. She was the oldest of five children. Her family moved often in her childhood and she never earned a degree, but she attended public schools and studied with private tutors. She became a librarian at the age of 21 at the Los Angeles Public Library. It was at the LAPL that she became interested in Government documents.

While at the Los Angeles Public Library, Ms. Hasse organized and classified the government documents there and compiled a checklist which became one of her many publications. She was first published in the Library Journal in 1895 and went on to publish bibliographies, checklists and indexes covering a broad range of topics in her long career.

Adelaide Hasse was the first librarian in the office of the Superintendent of Documents at the GPO (Government Printing Office). Though she spent only 2 years there, she is responsible for the cataloging scheme that is the backbone of the classification system used today - SuDocs. She organized the documents library at the GPO with such thoroughness and organization that "nearly 300,000 documents, including duplicates" were cataloged within weeks of her arrival at the GPO.

After leaving the GPO, Ms. Hasse organized the documents department at the New York Public Library. She had a "long and distinguished" career at the NYPL and worked with numerous government agencies such as the War Industries Board and the Council of National Defense, before her death in 1953. She also lectured at Catholic University and George Washington University in Washington DC, for a time.

Adelaide Hasse had a reputation for being driven, tireless, strong and unbending toward ignorance or foolishness. Nothing was ever as important to her as her work. She was dedicated to libraries and the organization of information until the day she died. Her obituary in the New York Times, July 29, 1953 testifies to her dedication to the profession.

Links and Sources

Photo courtesy of FDLP Desktop, GPO's Living History (linked above)

Corbin, John, "The Strange Career of Adelaide Hasse," Wilson Library Bulletin June 1981, p.756, 757.

New York Times July 29, 1953

Created for Dr. Gretchen Whitney's IS 490, Information Environment, at the University of Tennessee School of Information Science

by Jenny Horton, jhorto12@utk.edu, on November 30, 2004.