Scholarship History

Mary Lee Bundy received her Ph.D. from the library school at the University of Illinois. Dean Paul Wasserman recruited her from the library school at Albany to join the faculty of the College of Library and Information Services at the University of Maryland. Dr. Bundy's teaching and research focused on reference and information services (especially to underserved populations in the U.S.), administration, and research methods. In the late 1960's, she wrote the proposal to start the doctoral program at the College.

Dr. Bundy was the major intellectual force behind the urban information programs (including the federally funded High John Project) at the College in the late 1960s into the very early 1970s. For a variety of reasons related to College and campus academic standards and politics, the urban program was discontinued by February 1972. In the Spring of 1972 Dr. Bundy was given an early sabbatical, an episode in the life of the College which she later chronicled in her publication entitled The Devil Has a Ph.D.

She later turned her attention off campus and, with money inherited from an uncle, created Urban Information Interpreters, Inc., a firm where she concentrated her research, publication, and training efforts. She led a national clearinghouse to try to stop medical experimentation on prisoners, concentrating her efforts on the Maryland State prisons in Jessup, MD. She also created reference books including The National Prison Directory.

Dr. Bundy had a strong intellectual impact on William G. Wilson, especially throughout the three semesters during which they team taught the basic reference and information services course in the College. Mr. Wilson eventually helped Dr. Bundy create a room in which ephemeral publications and information related to her helping organizations and concerns were collected and organized for the use of students in her two courses on information sources and information services. Mary Lee Bundy epitomized the "services" aspect of the profession.

In addition to William Wilson, Dr. Bundy had a strong personal impact on some of her students, especially those who took her research methods course and then followed that with an independent study to actually produce a research product. Many of those research efforts eventuated in journal articles or other publications, frequently co-authored by Dr. Bundy. In the 1970's Mary Lee Bundy had a major national reputation and impact on the profession, mainly through her publications. By the late 1970's when Robert Hayes of UCLA did his citation study of the writings in the LIS field, Dr. Bundy was among the top 20 in the field nationally.

As graduates of CLIS have matured in their professional lives, several of them truly influenced by Dr. Bundy have achieved marks of distinction in the profession, the most visible of whom is Leslie Burger, the current President of the American Library Association and the 2005 College of Information Studies Alumna of the Year.

In order to honor Dr. Bundy's memory and her outstanding participation and influence in the Library and Information Services profession, retired College Librarian William G. Wilson established an endowed fund to support a scholarship in the College of Information Studies.