by Jeremiah Paschke-Wood
With the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association nearing its 35th Anniversary celebration, we continue remembering and honoring some of those instrumental in the founding of the organization. One such person is Lourdes Collantes.
Lourdes Collantes was born in a province 30 miles from Manila in the Philippines, one of seven children (McCook, 1998). The daughter of a professor at the University of the Philippines and a rice mill owner, she received her B.A. from the University of the Philippines. After helping with a cataloging project at UP as an undergrad, she decided to pursue a Master’s in Library Science, enrolling at Rutgers University in 1958.
At Rutgers, Collantes received her Master’s of Library Science degree and would also eventually pick up a M.Ed. and Ph.D. (in 1992) due to the scarcity of library jobs at the time. She served as an intern with East Orange (N.J.) Public Library for 14 months before returning to the Philippines to serve as Librarian-in-charge of the Social Sciences Division and Humanities and Reference at the University of the Philippines from 1961-67.
Named Assistant Professor in 1966, she also served as the Head of Acquisitions from 1968-71. In 1972, she became Assistant Librarian at Rutgers University’s Mathematical Sciences Library and then, one year later, became Associate Librarian at State University of New York at Old Westbury. She held this position for 24 years, before being named Acting Director in 1997.
At the 1980 American Library Association conference in New York, Collantes, Suzine Har Nicolescu, Sharad Karkhanis, Conchita Pineda, Henry Chang, Betty Tsai, and Tamiye Trejo Meehan met and decided to found the Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association (Yamashita, 2000). Collantes would serve as president of APALA in 1983-84. But her involvement with the organization did not end there; she also chaired the Awards, Nominations and Constitutions and Bylaws Committees. Within the American Library Association, Collantes served on the ALA Awards Committee from 1984-88 and was the chair of the Pay Equity Committee from 1991-93 and chair of David Clift Scholarship Committee in 1986.
Among additional accolades, Collantes was named Delegate to the People to People Library and Information Science Delegation to the People’s Republic of China in 1985, received Professional Development Librarian Research Awards from United University Professions in 1985 and 1987 and received the SUNY Chancellor’s Award for Excellence in Librarianship in 1994.
She was also well-known in the library field for publications including “Degree of Agreement in Naming Objects and Concepts for Information Retrieval” in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and edited Asian/Pacific American Librarians: A Cross Cultural Perspective.
Lourdes Collantes could not be reached for this article.
References
McCook, K. (1998). “Lourdes Collantes.” Women of Color in Librarianship: An Oral History. Chicago, American Library Association
Yamashita, K. (2000). “Asian/Pacific American Librarians Association—A history of APALA and its founders.” Library Trends, 49(1), 88-109. Last retrieved June 22, 2014, from: http://www.apalaweb.org/wpsandbox/wp-content/uploads/2010/07/apalahistory.pdf
Editing assistance provided by Alyssa Jocson.