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Behind some of the essential tools of federal documents librarianship is a tiny, five-foot, almost silent but inexhaustible bundle of energy and perseverance. As alarm clocks are ringing for most of us on weekday mornings, Mary Elizabeth Poole is on her way to the D.H. Hill Library at Raleigh's North Carolina State University campus. From seven A.M. until … with thirty minute lunches and without breaks, Miss Poole pours herself into a profession which has come to regard her as somewhat of a legend.

Despite the familiarity of her name and publications, Miss Poole herself remains an anomaly to many documents librarians. This is because her works literally stand before her. She is behind the public scene-always. But because of this we have, among other tools, the Documents Office Classification and Monthly Catalog Classes Added.

When Bernadine Hoduski brought together Miss Poole and publisher William Buchanan, work began on the Classes Added project and Miss Poole's private life came to a complete halt. A piece of needlepoint went into the closet while, for a year and a half, literally every waking moment was documents. From five a.m. until D.H. Hill opened, for late hours after her library work, for every single weekend, Miss Poole kept up her marathon stint for the project. She has turned over the royalties, more than $17,000, to the D.H. Hill Library.

Co-workers marvel silently, for the unassuming Miss Poole quite clearly considers what others may term "obsessive work" as part of her professional commitment. As she states in the preface to the Documents Office Classification and, as she will tell you concerning any of her work, "I did it because we needed it".

Miss Poole speaks to the point, without hyperbole, expressing values one may link to her Troy, North Carolina upbringing. Oldest daughter of a lawyer and peach orchard owner, Miss Poole learned work and responsibility on after school evenings and college summers in the peach business.

Duke University Library was the first to get the industrious Miss Poole after she finished her LS degree from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill in 1936. While at Duke she reclassified the documents collection from Dewey Decimal to Superintendent of Documents and began the list which would evolve into the monumental Documents Office Classification, now in its fifth edition.

Miss Poole insists that this list would have never been published without the encouragement of Reba Davis Clevenger, Acting Librarian at D.H. Hill when Miss Poole began work there in 1945. Miss Poole not only inherited Mrs. Clevenger's documents collection, but also the encouragement and inspiration that has been the prime mover behind all her professional work.

Among some of the outstanding accomplishments is Miss Poole's 33 years at D.H. Hill is her documents card catalog system. When she began formulating her plans for this, the library director told her she didn't have time to make a catalog; she was then and, until a few years ago, a documents staff of one. She replied to the director, "I don't have time not to have a good catalog." He agreed and what resulted was a card catalog that makes the mysterious world of federal publications accessible to the previously frustrated layman.

Miss Poole first got into documents quite accidentally she says, but soon "discovered how much fun they were." One of the attractions for her is that "each documents department is its own little library." Categorically she states that all documents librarians love their work.

But documents by no means complete Miss Poole's story. Her interests and hobbies are kaleidoscope-rich and phenomenal in number. She is skilled in photography and accomplished in ceramics; she knits and needlepoints and has dabbled in woodworking; she exhibits her dolls and soon will try making some; her collections include stamps and children's literature, shells and Easter eggs and African violets. And Miss Poole grows almost everything but we all favor spring for her daffodil bouquets.

Miss Poole has so many interests to call on her time and could turn to them now with a lifetime of contributions to government documents behind her. But documents librarians will be pleased to know that in a recent letter to Miss Poole, Mrs. Clevenger wrote, "I know that in some way you'll always be working in docs." And if Mrs. Clevenger says so, we can count on it.

-- Debby Dwyer and Jean M. Porter

DttP v. 6, no. 5, p. 183