Librarian Braverman Dies at 82

Miriam Braverman, librarian, professor of library science, and lifelong social activist, died October 21 in New York City. She was 82.

After receiving her MLS from Pratt Institute in 1964, Braverman worked as a young adult specialist at the Brooklyn Public Library (BPL). She earned her doctorate in library science at Columbia University, where she taught until her retirement in 1982.

Braverman worked toward various social and political causes throughout her life, including racial equality, and used her profession as an instrument of change. She once stated that "claims of respect for human life were empty rhetoric if librarians continued as merely neutral disseminators of information."

In the 1960s, Braverman joined the civil rights movement, traveling throughout Mississippi during the Freedom Summer of 1964 to help establish equitable library services for blacks as part of the organization Friends of Freedom Libraries. Braverman documented her experience and the struggle to desegregate public libraries in an article for SLJ entitled "Mississippi Summer" (November 1965, pp. 31–33).