THE LIBRARY COMPANY OF PHILADELPHIA
Emily Guthrie appointed Librarian
We are pleased to announce the appointment of Emily Guthrie as the new Librarian of the Library Company of Philadelphia. Emily will succeed James Green as Librarian, a position he has held for much of his 35-year tenure.
Emily comes to us from Winterthur, where she has been the Library Director since 2017 and NEH Librarian for the Printed Book since 2009. She brings considerable expertise about American books and material culture – important prerequisites for any Librarian of the Library Company – but also considerable experience with management and administration. She was chosen though a nation-wide search process led by a search committee of Library Company Trustees and the Edwin Wolf 2nd Director, Michael Barsanti and supported by an outside firm, Museum Search & Reference.
Emily earned a BFA in historic preservation from the Savannah College of Art & Design in 1997. In 2001, she returned to school to earn an MSLS from the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Her graduate career at UNC included assistantships in the Sloane Art Library and Southern Historical Collection, as well as curation of a major special collections exhibition titled W.C. Coker: Legacy of a Lifelong Botanist. Emily joined the staff of the Winterthur Library in 2005 as Assistant Librarian for the Printed Book and Periodical Collection. She was promoted to NEH Librarian for the Printed Book and Periodical Collection in 2009, taking on primary responsibility for collection development in that division. The highlights of her collection development career (so far) include the acquisition of five important late 18th- to early 19th-century textile pattern books by Johann Friedrich Netto; numerous long runs of rare 19th-century periodicals acquired from the Wilmington Library; and the development of the Saul Zalesch Collection of American Ephemera, a collection of over 4,600 trade catalogs, cookbooks, and other bits of printed ephemera donated by a former Winterthur research fellow.
In 2011, she oversaw the digitization of over 900 of Winterthur's trade catalogs for the Internet Archive. She led Winterthur's contribution of 1,195 library items to the digital collection Trade Catalogues and the American Home, published by Adam Matthew Digital in 2017. Emily has also contributed collections of textile pattern books and some of the library's earliest trade catalogs to the in-house digital platform, ContentDM.
Emily enjoys writing and lecturing about library collections and curating exhibitions of library materials. In 2017, she curated Go to Your Room! Interior Design and Youthful Imagination for the Society of Winterthur Fellows Gallery. She has contributed numerous collection articles to Winterthur Library News. She co-authored "Trade Catalogs: Opportunities and Challenges," an article appearing in the fall 2015 issue of Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America.
Emily will begin work at the Library Company in April. We will have an online event to welcome her to our community shortly thereafter, and we will hope to introduce her in person sometime in the fall.
