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| title | chunk | source | category | tags | date_saved | instance |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Adelaide Hasse | 3/4 | https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Adelaide_Hasse | reference | science, encyclopedia | 2026-05-05T17:06:11.891784+00:00 | kb-cron |
== New York City == Once again, Hasse left an unpleasant situation only to land in the beginnings of an organization. Hasse had known John Shaw Billings, Director of the recently reorganized New York Public Library (NYPL), for several years and was thrilled to take a position in NYPL's newly created Astor Library. A reporter from The New York Times met Hasse on her second day of work and wrote an article entitled, "Miss Hasse's Unique Task." In it, Hasse described her previous work at the GPO and her hopes for developing a public documents division in New York. When the NYPL consolidated its borough branches, it was said to have housed "one of the world's greatest collections of government publications," with items dating back to the American colonies. Hasse's work developing and classifying this special collection garnered her praise from the top periodicals in the field, most especially from Library Journal, for which she was a regular contributor. As the leader in document classification, she was selected to serve on the ALA Committee on Public Documents in 1897, and from 1904 to 1908, even served as its chair. Billings, like Kelso at the LAPL, was a warm, nurturing supervisor to Hasse, giving her free rein to work as she pleased. Due to this freedom, she was able to track down the first book ever published in New York (1693), Narrative of an Attempt Made by the French of Canada Upon the Mohaque's Country, which, coincidentally, also happened to be the first government publication as it was written at the request of the governor. As Hasse increasingly became a household name for librarians, it was only natural that librarians in the Federal Depository system would begin requesting her assistance in dealing with their own documents. She even assisted Oregon employment lawyers in compiling information and documentation to support their cases against the state, as in Muller v. Oregon and Bunting v. Oregon. At a time when women were expected to be seen and not heard, once again, her actions won her more enemies than friends. In 1911, Hasse was moved to the Documents Division of the NYPL where she was given the additional task of providing reference services, which greatly diminished the time she had available for working on NYPL's massive collection of government and municipal documents. The Documents Division was closely related to the Economics Division, which was led by Charles Williamson. It was at this point that Hasse's reputation as a misandrist and "classic difficult woman, selfish, bad-tempered, and unreasonable" began to unfold. As she was passed over for promotions with some regularity, her less experienced male supervisors sought to undermine her authority and expertise in government documents at every turn. In 1915, the Chief Reference Librarian, Harry Miller Lydenberg, under new NYPL Director Edwin H. Anderson, launched a campaign against her, claiming that her entries were "erroneous or inconsistent." This campaign gathered steam and continued until her termination from the NYPL in 1919. The beginning of the end for Hasse was when Anderson and Lydenberg removed her from her special collection to the Cataloging Division because they claimed that she "refused to 'coordinate' with the cataloging office on her work." After twenty years of cataloging government documents on her own, she was now little more than just another cataloging staff member. Anderson eventually fired Hasse "via a two-sentence letter" and denied her request for a meeting as to why she was fired as well as for a hearing. Patrons of the library were even told not to associate with her when she came in as a patron after her dismissal, and her supporters working in the library, as well as those she hired, were fired soon after.