Memoriam: Lynn C. Westney (1947-2021)

Abstract

On the day before Christmas 1947, Joseph and Alma Tvrdik welcomed a new baby girl into their home in Chicago, Illinois. They named their little girl, Lynn Carol Tvrdik ("Chicago Tribune" 2021). 1 An intelligent and inquisitive child, Lynn discovered the joys of reading and writing from very early on. She would remain true to those passions her entire life. After completing high school, Lynn applied to the undergraduate program of Loyola University. She was accepted and earned a Bachelor of Arts in Sociology. Still hungry for more, she went on to obtain a Masters of Science in Library and Information Science from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign (UIC). It was there that Lynn discovered what would become her institutional home.For 25 years, Lynn remained at UIC. Over the years, she became an Associate Professor and the Coordinator of Reference Collection Development for UIC's library system. Although today, Library Science in the United States is often seen as a typically female domain 2 , at the time Lynn entered the profession, this was far from the case. According to statistics compiled by the Association of Research Libraries, between 1976 and 1977, 89% of all directorships were held by men (Irvine 1985, 236). Within a few decades, this glaring gender discrepancy in library science and other historically male occupations ended, thanks to a combination of two factors. The first was the passage of revolutionary legislation that forbade employment discrimination on the basis of gender and promoted the active recruitment and advancement of qualified women 3 . The second was a new generation of courageous female scholars who were ready, willing, and more than able to take on positions of leadership (Irvine 1985;Swisher, Ruhig DuMont, and Boyer 1985); Lynn was just such a woman.Lynn's entry into the professional world of library science came at a time when the entire discipline was undergoing yet another revolutionary change. With the introduction of affordable computer technology and the rise of the internet, the 1980's marked the start of mass digitization of library holdings. Gone were the days of card catalogs and microfiche. Data that had once taken up thousands of pages from stacks of printed books could now be stored on the space of an ordinary floppy disc, measuring only 5½ inches across. And this was only the beginning.During a Joseph Leiter Lecture given in April of 1986, Dr. R. Davis likened the impact of computer science on library science to the archetypal "Big Bang," resulting in a cosmic shift in the way libraries were designed, utilized, and managed (3). In the past, the typical library was a majestic edifice of brick and mortar that served as a physical repository for a society's most revered printed artifacts (Lynch and Brownrigg 1986). In the future, researchers predicted libraries would become digital informational hubs "located everywhere and nowhere at the same time" (Davis 1987, 3).