Ruth French Carnovsky

Ruth French Carnovsky (birth name Ruth Calista French , family name from 1935 Strout , from 1967 Carnovsky , born August 11, 1906 in Chippewa Falls , Wisconsin , † November 2003 in Oakland , California ) was an American classical philologist and librarian .

life and work

Ruth Calista French moved in 1909 with her family from Chippewa Falls to De Pere ( Wisconsin ), where she attended high school. Ruth French then studied Latin Philology at Carroll College in Waukesha (Wisconsin) from 1924 to 1928 . Simultaneously with her bachelor's degree , which she received with distinction in 1928, she won a scholarship in a competition of the Wisconsin Latin League, which enabled her to study for a master’s degree at Yale University . Ruth French studied classical philology and archeology there from 1928 to 1931 . From 1932 to 1934 she completed a doctoral degree at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign , where she wrote her dissertation under the direction of William Abbott Oldfather . On January 1, 1935, she married Donald E. Strout , another PhD student at Oldfather, with whom she wrote several articles for Pauly's Real Encyclopedia of Classical Classical Studies (RE).

From 1935 to 1938 Ruth French Strout lived in Hastings, Nebraska , where her husband worked as a professor (at private Hastings College ). In 1938 Ruth French Strout accepted a teaching position for Latin and Greek at the Iberia Junior College in Iberia, Missouri , which she held until 1942. From 1943 to 1944 she was a research assistant in the Ancient History Department at Indiana University Bloomington . In 1944, Ruth French Strout followed her husband's example and embarked on a career in library: she completed a one-year course in library science at the University of Minnesota , from which she graduated in 1945 with a Bachelor of Science. Her first job was shortly thereafter at the Minneapolis Public Library .

In 1949, Ruth French Strout went to the University of Denver , where she got a position as an associate professor at the Graduate School of Librarianship. From 1953 to 1954 she took leave there and went as a visiting professor of library science at Keiō University in Tokyo . After her return, she moved to the University of Chicago in 1954 , where she spent the rest of her career, initially as Assistant Professor and Dean of Students, and from 1960 as Associate Professor.

Her marriage to Donald Strout was divorced in July 1953. On June 7, 1967, she married the second marriage in Glencoe (Illinois) to the widowed librarian Leon Carnovsky (1903-1975) and took his name. After her retirement (1971) Ruth French Carnovsky moved with her husband to Oakland ( California ).

Her scientific publications were initially under the influence of her mentor William Abbott Oldfather, who led her to the text criticism of the Greek and Latin church fathers . In her doctoral thesis (1935), Ruth French examined the Greek translations of Hieronymus ' (Latin) Vita Hilarionis ; She took up this topic again later (1943) in an anthology by Oldfather. From the 1940s onwards, she emerged in librarianship circles with numerous articles that dealt primarily with subject indexing and cataloging . In 1966 she published a two-part textbook for distance learning in library science; She also organized specialist conferences at the University of Chicago and published their contributions in anthologies (1957, 1964).

Fonts (selection)

• The Greek Versions of Jerome's Vita Sancti Hilarionis . Urbana, Illinois 1935 (PhD thesis). Revised version in: John Frank Cherf and others (editors): Studies in the Text Tradition of St. Jerome’s Vitae Patrum. Urbana, Illinois 1943, pp. 306-448.
• Organization of Library Materials: Library Science A54-55 . 2 parts, University of Wisconsin 1966.
• The Development of Subject Access to Literature . Los Angeles 1969.

Editing

• Toward a Better Cataloging Code. Papers Presented Before the Twenty-first Annual Conference of the Graduate Library School of the University of Chicago, June 13-15, 1956 . Chicago 1957.
• Library Catalogs: Changing Dimensions. The Twenty-eighth Annual Conference of the Graduate Library School, Aug 5-7, 1963 . Chicago 1964.

literature

• John Frank Cherf and others (editors): Studies in the Text Tradition of St. Jerome’s Vitae Patrum. Urbana, Illinois 1943, p. 560 (short biography).
• The World Who's Who of Women . 2nd edition (1974), p. 174.

Individual evidence

1. Jump up ↑ Date and place of death: University of Chicago Magazine, Volume 96, Number 5 (June 2004). Retrieved September 4, 2017 .