History of the Research Library at the Abramson Center for Jewish Life

[Editor's note: The Research Library of the Madlyn and Leonard Abramson Center for Jewish Life closed on Friday, February 27, 2009. To commemorate the fifty years of service of the librarians and staff to their patrons, outside researchers, and the library community, I present this timeline to chronicle the library's history. Queries about the collection should be directed to Susanne Morganstein, grants administrator of the Polisher Research Institute at the Abramson Center for Jewish Life: smorganstein@abramsoncenter.org]

Many thanks to Barbara Halpern, Joyce Post, Sheryl Panka-Bryman, and Mary McCaffrey for taking the time to write to me or talk on the phone, and reminisce about this wonderful library.

• 1952 The Philadelphia Geriatric Center (PGC) is created with the merger of two community homes for the aged.
• 1959 The PGC Library is started with a part-time, nonprofessional “librarian.” The library is located on 13th Street near Wagner in North Philadelphia. A neighborhood map is available:
  

• 1963 M. Powell Lawton, a psychologist at Norristown State Hospital, is recruited to direct research at the Center. He will work with three of the four librarians.
• 1975 First professional librarian Barbara Halpern is hired by Maurice Greenbaum, the PGC administrator. Barbara earned her MLS from Columbia (and her B.A. in Biology from Barnard). Her first library job was Reference Librarian at the Albert Einstein College of Medicine. Barbara serves as the PGC librarian from 1975-1986, both for the medical library and the behavioral health care library. While starting out at fifteen hours per week, she eventually achieves full-time status. The medical library is separate from the behavioral collection, the former housed in the main PGC building on Old York Road and the latter within Dr. Lawton’s research department on 13th Street. The librarian participates in the Medical Library Association’s (MLA’s) Exchange for interlibrary lending services throughout the country. Outside of the MLA Exchange, she participates with the local AAA (Area Agency on Aging) library in center city–Philadelphia Corporation for Aging. Barbara says, “The most amazing aspect of the job was that my acquisitions budget seemed to be limitless, thanks to the generosity of Maurice Greenbaum…. In all that time, there was no money to computerize the collection, so I concentrated on original cataloging and bought material like crazy. Space was always a problem.”
• 1980 Barbara Halpern hires Mary McCaffrey part-time. Mary will remain at PGC for 22 years. Barbara says, “Mary was the most valuable co-worker I ever had. She should be given a lot of credit.”
• 1983 The library joins the National Network of Libraries of Medicine (NN/LM).
• 1986 Barbara Halpern leaves PGC. She works at the Abington Library, then the Jenkintown Library. She eventually moves to Boston and holds a couple more library positions until retiring.
• 1986 Joyce Post, who originally started at PGC as a Utilization Review Manager in the Medical Records Department in October 1985, is asked by Maurice Greenbaum to run the libraries. This is effected in February 1986. The library also has no computers, and Joyce must use one in a researcher’s office after hours in order to teach Medline classes. Eventually, both Joyce and Mary will get computers.
• 1988 The library starts participating in Docline, the National Library of Medicine’s interlibrary lending service for health sciences libraries. The library also joins the Delaware Valley Information Consortium (DEVIC). Joyce recalls, “The research library was on the first floor … of [this] little old house, with creaking floors barely able to support the weight of the shelving and books. Our ILL business had been steadily growing and every day Mary had to schlep (in a book cart) the bound volumes across a small, open courtyard to the main building where there was a photocopy machine. Mr. Greenbaum explained when he first showed me the old house, that plans were in the works to move this library up to York House North [across the street from Einstein]. Almost immediately after taking the position I was deep into planning this move. Shortly after moving we got our own copy machine. At first we were in one apartment and the sunporch next door at the end of one of the halls on the second floor. As the collection grew we took over the apartment on the other side of the hall, and that became the journal room. The original apartment was the library office.”
• 1989 – 1996 Joyce gives presentations on the use of the Internet by older persons and gerontological professionals to the American Society on Aging, the University of California at Berkeley Center on Aging, the Association for Gerontology in Higher Education, the National Aging Information Center, the Gerontological Society of America, the Pittsburgh and Delaware Valley Mid-Atlantic Geriatric Education Centers, and the Pennsylvania Library Association.
• 1991 Joyce increases Mary McCaffrey’s position to full-time with the title Library Assistant.
• 1992 Joyce receives an 18-month Outreach Grant from the National Library of Medicine to train healthcare professionals in local nursing homes and longterm care facilities to use computers for MEDLINE searches. Document requests are filled either from the PGC collection or through ILL connections.
• 1994-1999 Joyce compiles and publishes the regularly updated Internet and E-Mail Resources on Aging: an Online Directory on the U.S. Administration on Aging’s home page.
• 1996-1997 Joyce writes twelve columns on “Internet Resources on Aging” in The Gerontologist.
• 1999 Joyce Post retires. Mary McCaffrey moves the library from 13th Street to Wagner Avenue.
• 2000 Sheryl Panka-Bryman is hired by Dr. Lawton, by this time Senior Research Scientist and Director Emeritus of Research, to run the libraries.
• 2000 The Philadelphia Geriatric Center, with a large donation from the Abramson family and numerous other supporters, moves to Horsham Township under the name Madlyn and Leonard Abramson Center for Jewish Life.
• 2000 The medical and behavioral research libraries are merged and move from North Philadelphia to Jenkintown in the Benjamin Fox Pavilion.
• 2001 M. Powell Lawton dies.
• 2002 Sheryl automates the library’s catalog, supported by an LSTA (Library Services and Technology Act) grant, and the library joins AccessPA. The ILS system is Inmagic DB/TextWorks. Sheryl also establishes the Community Education Center, later renamed the Community Resource Center, a collection of health-related books for older people. It is housed in the Residents Library at the Abramson Center.
• 2002 Due to the library’s pending move out of the area, Sheryl leaves for a position at the University of the Arts and Mary McCaffrey retires.
• 2002 Research Librarian Rachel R. Resnick is hired by Director of Research Vicki Freedman, Ph.D. Immediately after hiring Rachel, the library moves from Jenkintown to Horsham Township.
• 2002-2003 Rachel establishes the Lawton collection, a physical collection of books written by, written about, edited by, or contributed to, by M. Powell Lawton.
• 2003 Full-time Assistant Librarian Karen Kohn is hired.
• 2004 At the request of the executives of the Abramson Center, the Leadership Collection is established. This collection, started with a donation from Stephen Rowell of Reconnect, LLC, is comprised of business and leadership titles.
• 2004 Rachel is awarded an LSTA grant to plan for the digitization of presentations made by Dr. Lawton throughout his career.
• 2004-2006 Karen manages a quarterly lecture series, “Growing Wiser about Growing Older,” which is presented to the public to highlight research accomplishments and provide information about aging-related topics. Presenters include research investigators, Abramson Center staff, and community experts.
• 2005 Due to the growth of the Residents Library and the lack of interest in the collection, the Community Resource Collection is closed; some items are donated to the Residents Library, while others are reintegrated into the Research collection.
• 2005 Karen Kohn leaves to work at Arcadia University.
• 2006 Rachel is awarded an LSTA grant for the implementation of the Lawton Digital Archive (LDA), currently available at http://www.accesspadigital.org/spgcp/.
• 2006 Part-time Assistant Librarian Nicole Snyder is hired. Rachel and Nicole begin metadata creation for the LDA. Due to budget constraints, this position is eventually eliminated. Nicole finds employment at a law firm, Connolly, Bove, Lodge & Hutz, in Wilmington, Delaware. Volunteer Arthur Shum, a Drexel LIS student, assists in the completion of the LDA. Arthur later is hired as Systems Specialist at University of Hawaii at Manoa.
• 2006 Rachel migrates the ILS from Inmagic to EOS.Web Express, with partial support from a Technology Improvement Award from the National Network of Libraries of Medicine/ Middle Atlantic Region (NN/LM-MAR).
• 2007 Rachel establishes AGELIS, a Docline group of libraries with gerontological collections who agree to reciprocal sharing.
• 2008 The research library joins Docline group AMHL, but does not renew membership in 2009.
• 2008 December: Due to severe budget constraints the decision is made the close the research library. It holds more than 8,000 monographic titles and more than 300 serial titles (of which about 50 are active), making it the fourth largest gerontological research library in the United States, after the AARP Research Information Center, the library at Andrus Gerontology Center at the University of Southern California, and the Information Resource Center at the American Health Care Association. The library does approximately 700 interlibrary loan transactions per year. It is a member of the National Network of Libraries of Medicine and AccessPA, and is a member of these interlibrary lending consortia: DEVIC, BHSL, AGELIS, FREESHARE.
• 2009 The library achieves its 50th anniversary, making it the oldest gerontological research library in the United States.
• 2009 February 27 The library closes. At the time of this writing, the disposition of the collection has not been determined.

All of the librarians kept statistics; some are spotty, but some could be found from as far back as 1986. Here are a few figures:
Reference questions and literature searches: nearly 6,000
ILLs borrowed: more than 11,000; nearly half were received from DEVIC libraries
ILLs loaned: more than 22,000; more than half of which were furnished to BHSL libraries

Submitted by Rachel Resnick
an information professional in Horsham, PA
rachel.r.resnick@gmail.com