Longtime UH Librarian Establishes Endowment
Jack Hall has established an endowment supporting international travel for UH librarians.
Jack Hall, cataloging librarian at the University of Houston Libraries, has established an endowment supporting international travel for UH librarians.
The endowment will provide assistance to UH librarians for expenses associated with international travel. Librarians are increasingly pursuing professional development and scholarly activities on a global scale, attending conferences and sharing expertise on a number of topics in information science.
Hall has been a UH librarian since 1976, primarily in cataloging. He was also a reference librarian, and the subject librarian for English and linguistics for nearly 20 years. He was inspired to establish the international travel endowment based on his own experiences as a scholar and librarian.
“After studying and teaching linguistics and Germanic languages for several years, I decided to transfer my academic interests to librarianship,” Hall said. “I was active in the American Library Association, attending conferences and serving on and chairing a number of committees and interest groups.”
Hall spent two years studying abroad in Germany, 1964-1965, on a Fulbright Fellowship, and 1967-1968, on a Danforth Fellowship. He has always felt that these experiences have been fundamental to his academic and intellectual life and work as a librarian. He strongly encourages work and experience abroad as an extension of any librarian’s career.
Hall dates his interest in librarianship as far back as his childhood when he regularly used the county-library-supplied Bookmobile in his small home town of Damascus, Virginia, which had no library. The librarian who accompanied the Bookmobile recognized Hall’s maturity and interest in books and began recommending materials more advanced than a child might have otherwise encountered, greatly facilitating his education and intellectual development.
Hall is a Phi Beta Kappa cum laude graduate of Davidson College (1964) and has master’s degrees in Linguistics from Princeton University (1967) and in Library and Information Science from the University of Pittsburgh (1976). He was a member of the University of Virginia German Department and Linguistics Program faculty from 1970 to 1973. Hall joined the UH Libraries as a cataloging librarian on October 15, 1976.
After retiring in 2013, Hall continued to work part-time as a music cataloger. The length of his career at UH and his eagerness to continue working in the Libraries demonstrate the extent to which he values the Libraries and his colleagues.