John Ganly, former Assistant Director for Collections at The New York Public Library Science, Industry and Business Library (SIBL) died on April 5, 2016, just a week short of his 80th birthday.

As chief of the Economics and Public Affairs Division , John was an innovator, leading a team that in the early 1990s introduced rapidly evolving electronic information products to the widest possible audiences. When SIBL opened in 1996, he leveraged his excellent relationships with the vendor community to make premium business databases such as Bloomberg terminals available for the first time in a public library setting.

His view of collection development was an expansive one. He secured NEH funding to preserve NYPL’s incomparable trade literature, filming its textiles and apparel serials and well as its banking monographs. But John was not content to acquire and preserve information resources; he wanted to see them interpreted, applied, and used. During National Library Week in the late 1990s, he hosted a readathon where attendees shared excerpts from a seminal business or science text in SIBL’s collections, thus hosting  the initial public program in what is now a robust series of presentations by authors and other experts. John made SIBL a grantee in ALA’s first round of Smart Investing @ Your Library years ago, an experiment that provided the model for SIBL’s current Financial Planning Days. During the recession, he collaborated with prospective employers and vendor partners on a venture he dubbed After Outplacement. SIBL’s first job fair grew into the full range of services now offered in SIBL’s Job Search Central.

Before Healy Hall became the site of SIBL’s New York StartUP! Business Plan Competition training, John transformed it to a gallery and recruited a series of blockbuster exhibits including i on Infrastructure, The Real Men and Women of Madison Avenue, The  Subway at 100,; General William Barclay Parsons and the Birth of the New York City Subway  and Seeking the Secret of Life: the DNA Story in New York. These exhibits demonstrated John Ganly’s collaborative prowess, since all were mounted with underwriting from partners that ranged from professional and trade associations and commercial firms to government agencies, and higher education institutions. Photos from the show’s opening receptions capture John Ganly encircled by library staff and partner organizations. The role of connector was one that John relished.

John Ganly’s passion and talent found outlets beyond his beloved New York Public Library.  He enthusiastically represented NYPL at the Academic Business Library Directors. For decades, he taught business librarianship as an adjunct faculty member, first at Columbia University and then at the Rutgers School of Library and Information Science. He contributed to the professional literature, sometimes with collaborators.  His Data Sources for Business and Market Analysis was reprinted in four editions; an earlier manual that he co-edited, Small Business Sourcebook, was named an ALA Outstanding Reference Book of the Year in 1983.

But John was a man of action, not just words. The 1998 Gale Research Award for Excellence in Business Librarianship from the BRASS section of ALA’s Reference and Adult Services Division cites John Ganly’s on-the-ground training of library colleagues in Eastern Europe. The Business and Finance Division of the Special Libaries Association honored John twice—for Outstanding Achievements as a Business Librarian (1992) and as a Distinguished Member (2002) and chose the library he had helped to create—SIBL—for the SLA Business and Finance Division’s Center of Excellence in Service Award a few years later. SLA named him to its Hall of Fame in 2010. Among his myriad contributions to SLA–New York were his organizing information research services in New York City for both the Democratic and Republican National Conventions in 1992 and 2004 and his work to honor association members who had lost their lives on 9/11. A bittersweet recollection of John Ganly on September 11, 2001 is his walking down from his Upper East Side home to stand at SIBL’s front door and hand each of dazed New Yorkers seeking refuge at the Library a single yellow rose.

Five years after retiring from SIBL, John in 2014 self-published a first novel Celtic Crossings, a historical romance set in Ireland, London, New York in the 1800s. He was working on another manuscript when he died. Even while continuing to serve as a valued mentor to colleagues and friends at NYPL and beyond, John avidly pursued his wide ranging interests in history, music, politics, theater, travel, with his husband Bill Stern.

Colleagues, friends, and mentees are warmly welcome to share their memories of John in the comments section of this memorial post.

Books by John Ganly

Data Sources for Business and Market Analysis / by John Ganly.
Metuchen, N.J. : Scarecrow Press, 1994.

Data Sources for Business and Market Analysis / by Nathalie D. Frank and John V. Ganly.
Metuchen, N.J. : Scarecrow Press, 1983.

Serials for Libraries: An Annotated Guide to Continuations, Annuals, Yearbooks, Almanacs, Transactions, Proceedings, Directories, Services / edited by John V. Ganly and Diane M. Sciattara.
New York: Neal-Schuman Publishers, 1985.

Small Business Sourcebook: A guide to the information services and sources provided to 100 small businesses by associations, consultants, educational programs, franchisers, government agencies (federal, state, and local), reference works, statisticians, suppliers, trade shows, and venture capital firms / John Ganly, Diane Sciattara, Andrea Pedolsky, editors. Detroit, Mich. : Gale Research Co., 1983.

Selected Articles

• "Connections: Jobs." SLA Business & Finance Division Bulletin, no. 138, Spring 2008.
• "Connections: Nine Assumptions for the Future." SLA Business & Finance Division Bulletin, no. 135, Spring 2007.
• "Connections: Small is Big." SLA Business & Finance Division Bulletin, no. 136, Fall 2007.
• "Terese Terry talks with John Ganly of the Science, Industry and Business Library at the New York Public Library." (Interview) Business Information Alert. April 2007.
• Ganly, John and Kevin Manion. "Changing Job Descriptions Are a Sign of the Times." SLA Business & Finance Division Bulletin. 132, Spring 2006.
• Ganly, John and Andrea Harland and Kristin McDonough. "Scholars and Citizens: Making Research Level Collections Accessible to the Public at SIBL. Science & Technology Libraries, vol. 24, 2003.