Anna Harriet Heyer


Anna Harriet Heyer was a distinguished American academic music librarian, musicologist, and bibliographer who for 26 years, from 1940 to 1966, headed the Music Library at University of North Texas.

Career

, a renowned music librarian and musicologist, had given a lecture in 1937 at the first joint meeting between the American Library Association and the Music Library Association in New York City. In his lecture, Kinkeldey outlined a concept for an appropriate education in music librarianship. Until reading the transcript, Heyer had never contemplated a specialization in music librarianship — she had not even known it existed. The concept intrigued her because, in her words, "It would give me a chance to be within an interest that I like and still do library work."
Heyer traveled to Columbia University the summer of 1938 to enroll in a course taught by Richard Angell in "Music Library Administration" — the first any such course had been offered in the country. She stayed on at Columbia for the academic year 1938–1939, earning a Master of Science in Library Science, June 1939.
After spending a year working for the libraries at the University of Texas at Austin, Heyer, in 1940, accepted a position as the first full-time Music Librarian at the University of North Texas, whose College of Music, had, that same year, upgraded its 1939 induction as Associate member of the National Association of Schools of Music to Institutional member.
Heyer rapidly strengthened the Music Library, which already housed formidable collections, into a major music resource institution. She also forged music librarianship as a field of academic study by teaching the first known academic courses in the discipline. When she arrived, North Texas had acquired sizable collections that included orchestral scores, sheet music, phonograph recordings, and the Carnegie Corporation reproducing unit.
While working for North Texas, she earned a Master of Music degree from the University of Michigan in 1943.
In 1957, Heyer published a groundbreaking bibliography, Historical Sets, Collected Editions, and Monuments of Music: A Guide to their Contents. This reference stood for decades as one of the essential reference tools in the field of Western classical music. For comprehensive research music libraries, it became a guide for holdings.

Education