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Chair, Africana Librarians Council
<jc93@columbia.edu>
Obituary: John Bruce Howell,
Africana & International Studies Librarian at the University of Iowa
John Bruce Howell, International Studies (and Africana) Bibliographer of
the University of Iowa Libraries, died unexpectedly, after a brief
hospital stay, on February 28, 1997. He was 55. He is survived by his
wife, Barbara.
Dr. Howell was a national leader in Africana librarianship, actively
serving for many years in the Africana Librarians Council (ALC) of the
African Studies Association, and since 1990, as Chair of the Cooperative
Africana Microform Project (CAMP) at the Center for Research Libraries.
He was an accomplished author of many bibliographies, ranging from several
works on Eastern Africa produced for the Library of Congress in the 1970s
to the more recent "Rural Health in Kenya" (1989). He was co-author of the
_Index to the African Studies Review/Bulletin and the ASA Review of Books,
1958-1990_ (1991) and was nearing completion on an _Index to Issue: A
Journal of Opinion_, another ASA publication. He recently co-authored
"Guides, Collections, and Ancillary Materials to African Archival
Resources in the United States"(1996). He was also the founder and editor
of the new "Electronic Journal of Africana Bibliography" on the World Wide
Web <http://www.lib.uiowa.edu/proj/ejab/>, which includes the electronic
version of the 1996 guide.
Howell received a B.A. from Columbia University in 1965, an M.A. in
Library Science from Michigan in 1966, and a Ph.D. in Library and
Information Science from the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign in
1984. He held several positions in the African Section of the Library of
Congress between 1969 and 1980, before getting his Ph.D. at Illinois and
assuming duties at Iowa in 1985.. At Iowa, he helped to establish
important and vibrant institutional relations with Ibadan University,
Nigeria, and with many institutions in southern Africa.
John Howell was enormously kind, generous, and helpful to his many friends
and colleagues in librarianship and to countless researchers. His
knowledge of the world of archives and publishing in Africa and other
parts of the developing world was greatly respected; his advice on such
matters was much sought after. His sudden passing is a terrible loss
for African and International Studies.
Currently, two funds are being established in memory of John Bruce Howell:
(1) an Africana memorial gift fund for the University of Iowa Libraries
(donations to: The University of Iowa Foundation, Alumni Center, Iowa
City, IA 52242); and, (2) a memorial fund for the Preucil School of Iowa
City, a music school for stringed instruments from pre-school to high
school, to fund a student for one year or possibly to establish an
endowment for annual scholarships (donations to: Preucil School, 524 North
Johnson St., Iowa City, IA 52245.)
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