Rhoda Garoogian (1933–1998) was an American author and librarian who served as the Assistant Dean of the

Pratt Institute School of Information and Library Science Pratt Institute School of Information is the information school of the Pratt Institute, a private university in New York City. The school administers the oldest Library and Information Science program in North America. It was created in Brooklyn, ...

beginning in 1977, and Acting Dean from 1989 to 1991. Much of her scholarship was in the field of education for librarians and practices of library use, and she also co-authored a series of city ranking guides with her husband, Andrew Garoogian.

Education and career

Garoogian obtained her

Master of Library and Information Science The Master of Library and Information Science (MLIS) is the master's degree that combines two interdisciplinary academic disciplines. Library science is applied information science and a subfield of information science. This degree focuses on inf ...

from

Pratt Institute Pratt Institute is a private university with its main campus in Brooklyn, New York. It has an additional campus in Manhattan and an extension campus in Utica, New York at the Munson-Williams-Proctor Arts Institute. The institute was founded in 18 ...

in 1973. She worked as an adjunct reference librarian at

Brooklyn College Brooklyn College is a public university in Brooklyn in New York City, United States. It is part of the City University of New York system and enrolls nearly 14,000 students on a campus in the Midwood and Flatbush sections of Brooklyn as of fall ...

and a visiting instructor at Pratt before being appointed the Assistant Dean of the Library School in 1977. She served in this position until 1989, when she was promoted to Acting Dean. Throughout her career, she wrote about the information practices of libraries and librarians, as well as about the future of library school education. In 1980, she published an article in the Wilson Library Bulletin about the practices of the Pratt School of Library and Information Science, and about the future of the program. She discussed the importance of technology skills for librarians, highlighting the divergence between

librarianship Library and information science (LIS)Library and Information Sciences is the name used in the Dewey Decimal Classification for class 20 from the 18th edition (1971) to the 22nd edition (2003). are two interconnected disciplines that deal with inf ...

and information science. When Garoogian became Acting Dean in 1989, enrollment at the school had dropped to below 100 students, and in 1990, the school was downgraded to the Graduate Library and Information Science Department. During Garoogian's tenure as dean, enrollment was doubled, and the program was reinstated as a school.

Publications

The library technical assistant
(Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Pratt Institute, 1975)
Library Use of the New York Times Information Bank: A Preliminary Survey
(Reference & User Services Quarterly, 1976)
Inside our schools
(Wilson Library Bulletin, 1980)
AIDS, 1981-1983 : an annotated bibliography
(CompuBibs, 1984)
Careers in other fields for librarians : successful strategies for finding the job
(American Library Association, 1985)
America's top rated cities : a statistical handbook
(Universal Reference Publications, 1992) Garoogian and her husband published seven books in this series.

References

{{DEFAULTSORT:Garoogian, Rhoda 1934 births 1998 deaths American academic administrators 20th-century American librarians 20th-century American women librarians 20th-century American women writers Pratt Institute alumni Pratt Institute faculty 20th-century American academics 20th-century American women academics