Books, Bibliographies, and Pugs: A Festschrift to Honor Murlin Croucher

Murlin Lee Croucher

Murlin Lee Croucher Murlin Lee Croucher, the youngest of three children, was born in Rochester, New York, on August 24,1941, to Vera and Otis Croucher, who worked for Kodak. He graduated high school in Rochester, where he also studied violin at the Eastman School of Music. He attended a number of universities, including the University of Chicago and the University of Montreal, before entering the United States Army on June 30, 1963. While in the military, Croucher studied at the prestigious Defense Language Institute in Monterey, California, where he completed the 37-week intensive training program in the Russian language on June 19, 1964. The army then posted him to West Germany, where he spent the remaining years of his service, leaving active duty with an honorable discharge on June 9, 1967. After leaving the military, he enrolled in Arizona State University, and completed his B.A. in Russian in 1968. He entered the graduate program in Slavic Languages and Literatures at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the fall of 1968. He completed his M.A. in that department in 1972; his thesis was on "The Relation of Genre to the Incidence of the Dactylic Caesura in the Russian Six-foot Iamb during the Eighteenth Century." Earlier, Croucher had obtained his M.s. in the School of Information and Library Science in 1971, writing on "A Selected, Annotated Bibliography of English Language Translations and Criticisms of Brazilian Prose Fiction and Drama of the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries." Croucher began to work at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill in the Academic Affairs Library in 1971 as a Slavic Cataloger , and within a few years after receiving his library degree, he became the Slavic Bibliographer. From 1970 to 1980, he spent time in Czechoslovakia, where he twice enrolled in the Summer Program in Czech Language and Literature at Charles University in Prague. In 1980, Croucher left the University of North Carolina to take the position of Slavic Bibliographer at Indiana University, rising to the Gregory C. Ference and Bradley L. Schaffner, eds. Books, Bibliographies and Pugs. Bloomington, IN: Siavica, 2006, 9- 12. (Indiana Slavic Studies, 16. ) 10 GREGORY C. FERENCE rank of Associate Librarian. He continued to build Indiana's strong Slavic collection. Today, due to Croucher's dedicated work, the general Slavic collection (including Albanian, Baltic, Hungarian, and Romanian) holds one of the larger research collections in the Western hemisphere, with between 520,000 and 550,000 volumes covering over seven miles of shelving, and 1,600 serial subscriptions. Besides working with the Slavic collection, he was also responsible for strengthening the Central Asian and Tibetan collections. During his tenure at Indiana, Croucher served on numerous library and university committees, working closely with the Russian and East European Institute and numerous academic departments. As an Adjunct Assistant Professor of Library Science and an Affiliated Faculty of the Russian and East European Institute, he taught the cross-listed three credit class L525/R525 "Soviet and East European Library Materials," later renumbered and renamed due to the advances in the field as L620/R620 "Topics in Information Literature, Bibliography: Slavic." The course provided library science and other interested students the opportunity for greater in-depth study of the information and literature sources of the Slavic area. The syllabus succinctly told those enrolled what to expect: "To acquaint graduate students with major Slavic bibliographic sources, while also training them to conceptualize bibliographic arrangements.... Another aspect of the class is to introduce the students to the tasks of a Slavic bibliographer . Thus, there will be sessions on book vendors, selection tools, exchange programs, and online bibliographic databases." In addition to teaching this class several times, he gave numerous guest lectures in other courses. Croucher worked tirelessly to establish successful book exchanges to support Indiana's academic programs with major and minor out-ofthe -way libraries throughout the Soviet Bloc, a very difficult task due to the icy climate of the Cold War. He made numerous book buying trips to Eastern Europe and Russia, where he also checked up on these book exchanges. In addition, he ran a flourishing duplicate book exchange with several academic libraries in the United States. He also met with countless foreign guests, gave tours of the library, and volunteered his time for numerous library and Russian and East European Institute activities. MURLIN LEE CROUCHER 11 The Russian and East European Institute...