Edna Mary Byerly ’41

Librarian and Professor Emerita Edna Mary Byerly ’41 died Nov. 16, 2012, in Cedar Rapids, Iowa. She was 93.

After working for Encyclopedia Britannica in Chicago, she worked at Cornell as recorder from 1949 through 1953. She earned a master’s degree in library science from the University of Illinois in 1956. She returned to Cornell in 1960 and worked at the library until her retirement in 1988.

As the catalog librarian at Cornell, Byerly was responsible for maintaining the card catalog. She also set the stage for the online catalog used today when she began converting records to machine readable format in the late 1970s. Byerly was appointed assistant director in 1973 and began serving as the interim director of the library in 1975. The next year she was honored with Cornell’s Alumni Award of Merit—now the Leadership and Service Award.