Women Who Shaped BPL: Curator Ellen Oldham

The Library’s collections are shaped by many factors: the collection development policy of the institution, the needs and interests of the patrons who use our collections, and by the vision of the staff charged with building collections. In Special Collections, the last factor can be quite influential and is the job of the curators on staff. The Rare Books Department has been shaped by many curators in the past 170 years—of which some voices have been more distinct than others. Anyone who has seen the radical posters and ephemera within the rare books collections has encountered the work of one of the more eclectic curators in the department’s history: Ellen Oldham.

Ellen Oldham began working at the Boston Public Library in 1950 as an assistant and spent her entire career in the Rare Books and Manuscripts Department. She quickly advanced to reference librarian by taking and passing both the qualifying and promotional examinations. From reference work to cataloging to preparing exhibits, there was nothing in the department that Ellen was not involved with. As Curator of Classical Literature, she explored the library’s collection of medieval and illuminated manuscripts, and as Curator of Printed Books, Ellen became interested in the history of print and especially women printers. Just open an issue of More Books and the BPL Quarterly from the 1950s-1960s, and you’ll come across numerous articles of a wide range of subjects, published by her. By the time she retired in 1984, Ellen had made a permanent impression on the Rare Books and Manuscripts Department.

However, Ellen Oldham was more than just books. She graduated from Vassar College with honors in Latin in 1943, from Yale in 1945 with a Master’s in Classical Language and Literature, and received her MLS from Simmons in 1957.  Prior to her time at the BPL, she was head counselor at St. Margaret’s Camp in South Duxbury and was an instructor in Latin at St. John the Baptist School in Mendham, New Jersey, where she also supervised the kitchen. The community of Anglican nuns of St. John the Baptist was established to work with marginalized women by providing and teaching them a trade. In addition to writing scholarly essays and doing the work of a trained rare books librarian and curator during the day, Ellen sang in the choir of St. John the Evangelist Church, a socially progressive church in Boston.  

Ellen’s life and worldview is reflected in the material she actively collected. In addition to purchasing material, she donated a significant amount of ephemera relating to the work of these activist communities. In particular, Ellen compiled all of the ephemera that makes up the frequently used Social Justice Collection (MS 7403). Both professionally and personally, Ellen made lasting contributions to the intellectual life of the BPL. At the same time, she made sure that the library would not forget that it was part of a broader social context and movement.