Ida Kidder

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Ida A. Kidder (née Clarke; 1855 – 1920) was a college librarian at Oregon Agricultural College, now Oregon State University, and nicknamed “Mother Kidder” by many students.^[1]

Early life and education[]

Ida Angeline Clarke^[2] was born in 1855 in Auburn, New York.^[3] Following the death of her husband, she attended both the New York Normal School at Albany and the University of Illinois, finishing her education in 1906.^[3] From there, Kidder moved to Washington where she worked at the Washington State Library at Olympia before continuing on to Corvallis, Oregon where she began work at Oregon State Library on the campus of Oregon Agricultural College.^[3]

Oregon Agricultural College[]

Kidder began work at Oregon Agricultural College in 1908, and upon arrival was asked to take account of the current library collections by the then university president, William Jasper Kerr.^[4] She tallied 7,180 general and reference books, 5,000 government documents, as well as approximately 10,000 pamphlets.^[4] These collections were housed in the Benton Hall Administration Building, eventually occupying the whole of the second floor.^[5] In 1917, Kidder and the student community lobbied for a new library building, which was approved by the OAC Board of Regents and the 1917 Oregon Legislative Assembly, allotting $158,000 for the project.^[5] The 57,000 square foot building was completed in 1918 and books were moved into the new library from Benton Hall by faculty and students due to a wartime labor shortage.^[5] While at OAC, Kidder spent years organizing, arranging, and expanding the library's collections as well as increasing staff numbers from one person to nine.^[4]

Community and professional involvement[]

In 1914, Ida Kidder was one of the speakers at the Oregon State Convention of Mothers and Parent-Teacher Association; she gave a talk on "The Proper Literature for Children."^[6] In her talk, she gave advice to both teachers and parents on how book impacted a child's psychology and understanding of the world.^[7] Kidder gave a talk at the Pacific Northwest Library Association in 1917; her topic was "Libraries and Inspiration."^[8] Other speakers addressed how World War I was impacting service, how to gather loan statistics from public libraries, and budget concerns.^[8]

She donated money to the First Baptist Church fund in 1916, which was gathering contributions to the American Armenian Relief Fund.^[9][10] In 1917, she twice donated to a fund to support Belgian children to the Progressive Business Men's Club of Portland, which was raising money through waste-paper collection and sale, as well as subscriptions to the organization, to give to the Patriotic Conservation League.^[11][12]

She served as a hospital librarian for the summer of 1918 at Camp Lewis, near Tacoma, Washington.^[13]

Death[]

Kidder suffered a heart attack in November 1919 and lost much of her mobility, leading engineering students to create the “Wicker Mobile” for her, a small electric cart which she drove around campus.^[14] She died on February 29, 1920 due to a brain hemorrhage. Kidder Hall, the old library building built in 1918 and which sits across from the current Valley Library, was named in her honor in 1963.^[5] Additionally, her ghost is said to haunt the fourth floor of Waldo Hall, her campus residence.^[1][14]

References[]