Gilbert J. Clausman, AHIP, FMLA, 1921–2011

Gilbert J. Clausman, AHIP, FMLA, president of the Medical Library Association in 1977/78, died on January 17, 2011, from complications of pneumonia after a brief illness. Over a career that spanned some forty years, he weathered vast changes in health sciences libraries and was involved in many important developments of the association. Gil, as he was known, was born in Los Angeles in 1921. He lived there for the first twelve years of his life but later moved to Salem, Oregon, where he attended the public schools, followed by Willamette University, where he majored in music and directed a church choir. His college education was interrupted by World War II. In 1941, choosing hospital work over being a conscientious objector, Gil volunteered as a Navy hospital corpsman. He served in the Pacific Theater until 1945 and worked in military operating rooms during the battles of Guam and Bougainville. After the war, he returned to his undergraduate studies, during which he worked in the college library and became interested in librarianship. He even went to business school at night to learn how to type, as it was then one of the requirements for library work. Pursuing his interests in both medical and music librarianship, Gil moved to New York, where he earned a bachelor's degree in library science and then, in 1952, a master's degree in librarianship from Columbia University, where he studied medical librarianship with Estelle Brodman. He was mentored by Bertha Hallam, from the University of Oregon Medical Library, and chose to pursue a career in medical librarianship rather than one in music librarianship. For the seven years from 1948 to 1955, Gil was at the New York Academy of Medicine Library. There he worked for Janet Doe, whom he said, “was the greatest influence on his professional life” [1]. He began as a reference assistant and progressed to supervisor of circulation. In 1955, he was appointed librarian of the New York University (NYU) Medical Center, where he remained to the end of his career in 1986. In an MLA oral history interview in 1983, Gil described the NYU Medical Library in 1955: The collection then consisted of 60,000 volumes with a huge pile of uncataloged books left on the shelves. There was 1 librarian on the staff, with some loosely supervised part-time help. She was a product of the Great Depression, and, very conscientious, she did everything herself: checked in the mail, did the binding, and was in charge of acquisitions. Cataloging was done at the main NYU campus downtown, and there was a backlog of cards that were not integrated into the catalog. When a former dean asked for a book, the librarian motioned to her head and said, “It's all up there.” She knew where it was, but no one else did. Gil recalled, “I had a terrible battle with subject authority…they were using things like ‘Women, diseases of’” [1]. Obviously, there was a lot that Gil wanted to do: just plain keeping house, classifying the collection, establishing rapport with the faculty, and turning the collection around to meet the needs of the staff, and so on. Most important was changing the administrative structure so that the medical library was not under jurisdiction of the main campus but would be responsible to the medical school and report to the medical dean. He began with a budget of $60,000 and some 30 years later had built a library of 145,000 volumes and subscriptions to 1,502 journals, with 8 professionals, a total staff of 23, and an annual budget of approximately $1,000,000. The library became an academic department, and the director became a department head in the NYU School of Medicine. Gil was especially proud of creating an archives collection in the library and of his work at the university advocating faculty status for all librarians. As a result, he was asked to serve on the NYU University-wide Library Council, and from there, he was elected to the NYU Faculty Senate. Gil worked hard to establish positive relationships with the faculty and students in the medical school by breakfasting every weekday morning with the senior clinical faculty and by indoctrinating students in the importance of medical information through library orientations that are still remembered by alumni faculty today. In 1980, Gil received special recognition from the NYU student body with election as an honorary member of the class, thereby becoming an official alumnus of the NYU School of Medicine. His career spanned an era of great social and technological advances, both for medical libraries and for medicine. Gil had started off as a reference librarian when there was no automation and no one had even heard of dry-process copier machines. As his career progressed, cataloguing via OCLC replaced homegrown cataloging and card catalogs were closed. Gil once remarked to Dr. Brodman that if he had to apply for a job at that time, he could not get a position, to which Dr. Brodman replied, “I know how you feel” [1]. Another determinant of change, he noted, was the increasing role of the federal government, with the advent of the Medical Library Assistance Act, MEDLINE, and the Regional Medical Library system. In his final years, Gil was active on the board of New York's Medical Library Center and hoped that the organization would create automated library systems that all of its medical school and hospital library members could uniformly adopt. Early in his professional life, Gil became active in the Medical Library Association (MLA). At that time, the association was very small and had fewer complexities than today. Gil became the first and only individual ever placed on the ballot for president of MLA by petition of the membership. It was “a fun time,” recalled Henry Lemkau Jr., FMLA, who still has a “Go With Gil” election button. Gil was a pragmatist who would “take the bull by the horns.” He engineered it that an MLA program manager who worked from her living room and charged the association rent was eased out [1]! Gil worked hard for the profession through MLA. While operating the famed Exchange list from his home at night, he streamlined the process of direct exchange that served the members well for many years. Among his proudest accomplishments as MLA president were tightening the association's fiscal and personnel management and mandating that the executive director should be a medical librarian. He was honored with the conferral of the MLA Fellowship in 1987. He felt strongly that the association should primarily be responsible to the membership and supported the involvement of the profession in creating standards for health sciences libraries, both through the Joint Commission and at the state level in New York. MLA was more to him than just a social network. He reminisced that “The Association has had a tremendous influence on me, for which I am grateful. I have made lifelong friends here and my own New York Regional Group is especially close to me.” He noted it was a “vital part” of his life [1]. Gil had a full life personally and professionally. He was a skilled raconteur, with a booming voice, demonstrating at times a dramatic personality combined with a good sense of humor. He presented a colorful image that was not to be forgotten by those who knew him. He loved to travel and continually pursued his love of music in his retirement years, during which he attended weekly concert matinees in New York City. He took great pride in his garden at his home in Connecticut, which included seventy-five kinds of evergreens, twenty-two different shrub roses, two rock gardens, and spring bulbs. His close circle of friends met annually at MLA meetings, exchanged greetings at important times, and shared his triumphs and rough spots in life.

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