Anne Richardson Kenney

Anne Richardson Kenney died at Hospicare of Ithaca on February 5. Anne was an Ithacan for 35 years, raising a son here. She was a pioneer in digital preservation of library and archival materials, and her long career at Cornell University culminated as the 11th Carl A. Kroch University Librarian.

Anne was engagingly witty and funny, a talented writer both professionally and for pleasure, and boundlessly energetic. She also had a talent for earning and keeping a wide range of friendships across many years and miles.  A passionate life-long gardener, Anne planted thousands of flowers, shrubs, and trees (including over 2000 daffodils) at her different homes in Ithaca and was certified as a Cornell Cooperative Extension Master Gardener. She was an adventurous traveler: trekking in Nepal, Patagonia, Tierra del Fuego, New Zealand’s Fiordland, and the Black Mountains of Wales, along Hadrian’s wall and the Tour du Mont Blanc, and to Machu Picchu and the summit of Mt. Kilimanjaro. Anne was a connoisseur of textile and ceramic art; a lifelong lover of libraries; a late‑blooming lover of small, noisy dogs; the likely holder of the world record for hikes around the Abbot Loop; and a fan of the St. Louis Cardinals. She relished presiding over an annual Winter Solstice party beneath a dime‑store tiara. Any obituary, she instructed, should “keep it light.”

Born and raised in a US military household, Anne and her five brothers had a peripatetic childhood, from Washington DC (where she was born), to Panama, New Hampshire, Maryland, and Alaska, where she graduated from Anchorage East High School. She left Anchorage thinking she was done with cold climes, earning a BA at Duke and a history MA at the University of Missouri-St. Louis. She co‑authored an award‑winning historical work, Women's Suffrage, Social Politics, and the French Third Republic. But by the time it appeared in print, she’d found her true calling, with a Masters in library science at the University of Missouri-Columbia and work as the Associate Director of the Western Historical Manuscripts and University Archives, University of Missouri.

Anne rose to become the head of one of the world’s major research libraries and an important figure in her profession for both research and administration. She joined the Cornell University Library in 1987, as Associate Director of the Department of Preservation and Conservation. Its Brittle Books Project was transferring deteriorating books to microfilm, but she realized that books could be preserved more efficiently, and more usefully, if newly emerged scanning technology could be applied to digitize them. After much experimentation, her group developed standards and methods for doing that accurately, despite the challenging variety of type fonts and sizes the scanning would have to handle. Those standards have been adopted throughout the world—for example, by the scholarly journal archive JSTOR and by the Google books project. Anne co-authored a monograph on this digital imaging work that received the Leland Prize from the Society of American Archivists. Once the content of books could be efficiently preserved as digital files, the next problem was how to preserve those files. That was addressed four years later in another Leland Prize book that she co-authored, and the book became the basis of a workshop she helped develop that has been used throughout the world. She devoted much of her career as the University Librarian (2008 to 2017) to promoting ways in which libraries all over the world could collaborate to preserve and provide wide access to the whole scholarly corpus.

She was a fellow and past president of the Society of American Archivists and a board member for the Association of Research Libraries, and in 2014 received the prestigious Hugh Atkinson Award from the American Library Association for her leadership in both research and library management. She also did significant public service, including work as a commissioner of the National Historical Publications and Records Commission, as a member of the National Science Foundation/European Union Working Group on research in digital preservation, and in testimony before a Senate subcommittee as an expert witness on the papers of Supreme Court Justices.

The first six months of Anne’s retirement were spent curating “The World Bewitch’d,” a spectacular exhibition on the origin and spread of belief in witchcraft—including both historical documents from Cornell’s remarkable Witchcraft Collection and pop culture artifacts (even snaring a loan of Judy Garland’s ruby slippers from The Wizard of Oz). She then embarked on a host of projects that have now been cruelly interrupted: writing mystery novels, raising two new puppies, planting 500 more daffodils, visiting all the major Civil War battlefields and Major League baseball parks, and traveling, leaving a trip to Russia at the top of her to-do list. In addition to her professional accomplishments, Anne was proud and pleased to have her recipe for southwestern cheese soup included in Simple Suppers, one of the famous Moosewood cookbooks. And the Master Gardener took unashamed delight in extending the vibrant season of her garden by spray-painting the alliums.

Anne’s mother, Marguerite Anne Shirley Kenney (one of the first women ordained into the Episcopal priesthood and the first woman priest to be appointed to a diocese in southern Virginia), and father, William Richardson Kenney (USAF colonel and first Chief Judge of the Air Force), are deceased. Surviving family are: her son, Michael Kenney Hickerson; her brothers, George (Olga Kitsakos-Kenney), James (Landry Wildwind), her twin Charles, John (Sarah Watkins-Kenney), and Thomas; her nieces Cortelyou Churchill Kenney and Elizabeth Pieratt (Mathew); and her nephews Caleb Kenney and William Kenney. She also leaves bereft a large extended family of friends and colleagues who already miss the companionship they so looked forward to at her beloved house on Cayuga Lake—on her deck, on her dock, and on the Winter Solstice.

Donations in her memory can be made to Hospicare (https://www.hospicare.org/donate/donationform/), Planned Parenthood (https://www.plannedparenthood.org/), or the Anne Kenney Endowment Fund at the Cornell Library. Donations to the endowment can be mailed to Jennifer Sawyer (130 East Seneca St., Suite 400, Ithaca, NY 14850) as checks payable to Cornell University Library, with “Anne Kenney Endowment Fund #0004762” in the memo line.

Anne Kenney, January 7, 1950 – February 5, 2022