NYPL's Kathie Coblentz: Dedicated Librarian & Master Cataloger

By NYPL Staff

March 1, 2022

In honor of Women's History Month, each March we take a look back at some of the remarkable women who changed The New York Public Library—and the field of librarianship—forever with our series, Foreword: Women Who Built NYPL. We share reflections from our current staff on how the impact of these trailblazing figures from the Library's 125-year history are still felt today.

A woman looks off into the distance in front of a large arch

Kathie Coblentz

About Kathie Coblentz

Kathie Coblentz was a dedicated research librarian who spent her entire 52-year career with The New York Public Library, working most recently in the Spencer Collection of the Miriam and Ira D. Wallach Division of Art, Prints and Photographs. Coblentz was a thorough and vigorous cataloger who took the responsibility of connecting the public to Library collections seriously. She would enthusiastically share her work and passions with the public through her blog posts, ranging from surveys of modern Scandinavian crime fiction (which she learned Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian to read) to highlighting gems of the collection, such as a banned book from the sixteenth century.

Kathie Coblentz’s Legacy

Reflection by Deirdre Donohue, Assistant Director, Wallach Collection and Laura O'Keefe, Special Collections Librarian (Retired)

Kathie started at NYPL on July 1, 1969, just weeks before the moon landing! She was recruited to join the Library right out of library school at the University of Michigan. She thought she'd do that until she could figure out what was next. She loved, loved, loved her job and her work family, both past and present. She was also devoted to the mission and purpose of all of the research libraries, and regularly volunteered as a tour guide for the annual open house at the Stephen A. Schwarzman Building.

Kathie was a dedicated librarian whose work created catalog and authority records that were the products of detective work, deep research, and scholarly skepticism about assumed facts, leading to truly rich description and access of items in the Library's coffers of great value and importance. She was glad to share her approach to rare book cataloging with colleagues who were new to the work, and mentored a number of them. She was also the most resilient during the pandemic, just got on with it and cataloged throughout. Kathie was among the first librarians who were eager to pop into the Library, check references, etc. Our weekly check-ins were the absolute best!

She had a secret cinephile life too and was an indexer, editor, and researcher on a number of publications about Clint Eastwood and other directors. The latest was the book Nichols and May: Interviews, edited by Robert E. Kapsis.

Kathie read many languages fluently, especially German, which she began studying on her own while she was in high school. She also learned Danish, Swedish, and Norwegian to read murder mysteries.

For her 50th anniversary at NYPL, we had a silk scarf custom printed for her in Denmark of Columbus’s letter in 1493 about his arrival in America from NYPL’s digital collections, because she always said it was extremely beautiful and should be a scarf. She loved it.