Ruth Brown, 94, librarian in city

Ruth E. Brown, 94, a librarian and archivist at several institutions in Philadelphia, died Saturday, Feb. 14, of cardiac disease at Cathedral Village in Roxborough, where she had lived since 1997.

She was a longtime resident of Center City.

An Allentown native, Ms. Brown came to Philadelphia to attend the University of Pennsylvania, and liked the city so much that she stayed.

"By the time I came along in the 1950s, she had already given up her car and her driver's license," said nephew Geoffrey Brown. "She took public transportation and the subway for the rest of her life."

Her plan was to pursue a career in medical or scientific research. She graduated from Penn in 1942 with a bachelor's degree in zoology and earned medical technician certification in 1943.

From 1943 to 1951, Ms. Brown was a technician, first in the pathology department at Thomas Jefferson University and later in the Harrison Department of Surgical Research at Penn's School of Medicine.

She spent from 1951 to 1963 working in various capacities for the American Heart Association of Southeastern Pennsylvania. In 1961, seeking a career change, she enrolled at what is now Drexel University and earned a master's degree in library science.

From 1963 to 1965, Ms. Brown was librarian for the Institute for Cancer Research at Fox Chase. In addition to running the 12,000-volume library, she conducted literature searches for the 150-person staff.

She took a job as librarian for the Academy of Natural Sciences in 1965 and stayed until 1975, running a far bigger collection of volumes and manuscripts.

During her tenure, the staff doubled, the budget tripled, and the number of acquisitions climbed, she wrote in an obituary she prepared for herself.

From 1976 until retiring in 1989, Ms. Brown worked at various times at Temple University's Samuel L. Paley Library, the American Philosophical Society Library, and the Biomedical Library at Penn. Her duties included organizing and cataloging their collections.

In retirement, Ms. Brown volunteered as a bibliographer for the Ban Chiang archaeology project, under the auspices of Penn's Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology. The project has unearthed and cataloged artifacts from a previously unknown Bronze Age at a village and mortuary site in northeastern Thailand.

Ms. Brown began volunteering in the 1990s - the early days of computerized bibliographies. Over the years, she entered the first few thousand references into the system, said Ban Chiang project director Joyce White. "It was quite a frustrating task, and frequently Ruth would exclaim about the 'whimsical' behaviors" of the computer and software, White said.

Ms. Brown was active in Democratic politics as a committeewoman and judge of elections in the Fifth Ward. "I would always check with her before voting in Philadelphia elections, as I knew she had well thought-out and researched opinions on candidates," White said.

In person, Ms. Brown was fiercely independent, a staunch liberal, and a "women's libber before that was fashionable," her nephew said.

"She really welcomed a healthy debate," he said. "You had to be on your game, because it was like visiting your college professor. There was no talking about the weather; it was politics, finance, economics, travel, history. She never lost that thirst for learning. She was a marvelous aunt - entertaining, but exhausting."

Surviving, besides her nephew, is nephew Craig H. Brown.

At her request, there were no services. Ms. Brown donated her body to science.

Donations may be made to the American Civil Liberties Union via www.aclu.org.