Murlin Lee Croucher.

Ference, Gregory C.

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 lamb 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 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-of-the-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.

The Russian and East European Institute, a federally funded Department of Education Title VI National Resource Center, relied heavily upon Croucher for his expertise in its periodic renewal grant applications of its Title VI of the Higher Education Act. In addition, he was instrumental in the Indiana University Library receiving a $164,000 Andrew W. Mellon Grant to prepare Slavic Studies librarians and a $240,000 Department of Education grant to digitize a twenty-year run (1956-75) of Letopis' Zhurnal'nykh Statei. This project converted citations from the Soviet index to journal articles into digital form, producing a word-searchable bibliographic database. Croucher discussed the details of the set-up and operation of the project and the trials and tribulations encountered during it in "Digitizing and Making a Web Site for the Soviet Letopis' Zhurnal'nykh Statei, 1956-1975," in Slavic and East European Information Resources, volume 3, issue 2-3, 2002.

Besides diligently performing his duties in his small, windowless office on the fifth floor of the Main Library, recently renamed the Herman B Wells Library, with a part-time helper, Croucher was a productive scholar. He published translations, numerous book reviews, including one covering the three-volume Eastern Europe: An Introduction to the People, Lands, and Culture, edited by Richard Frucht and published by ABC-CLIO in 2005, which appeared in Slavic and East European Information Resources, volume 7, issue 1, 2006. He also frequently participated in the annual University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign Summer Research Laboratory on Russia, Eastern Europe, and Eurasia Slavic Librarians Workshop, and presented approximately twenty papers at national and international conferences, including the panel "Preserving Slavic Collections for Future Generations" at the V International Slavic Librarians Conference "Librarians in Open Society" in Tallinn, Estonia, in 2000.

With Eliska Ryznar, he wrote Books in Czechoslovakia: Past and Present (Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 1989), volume 2 in the series "Publishing, Bibliography, Libraries, and Archives in Russia and Eastern Europe" of the Association of College and Research Libraries, Slavic and East European Section. He authored Slavic Area-Studies Serials on Standing Order at Indiana University, 1994, July (Bloomington: Indiana University Library, Slavic Office, 1994), and with the help of Gregory Keller and Carlton Stokes, Polish Literature in Translation, 1976-1996: A Guide to Monographic Works Housed in Indiana University's Main Library (Bloomington: Indiana University, 1998), which was an offprint of Indiana Slavic Studies, volume 9, 1998. His most important work remains the two-volume Slavic Studies: A Guide to Bibliographies, Encyclopedias, and Handbooks (Wilmington: Scholarly Resources, 1993). A revised, updated and greatly expanded edition appeared in 2005, published by Scarecrow Press in Lanham, Maryland. This is an essential reference work available at any institution seriously studying the region. It has been described as "an excellent overall guide to resources in the Slavic field," while Anna Cienciala, professor emeritus of history at the University of Kansas wrote about this reference source, "This is the most comprehensive work of its kind for Slavic Studies." Zdenek V. David of the Woodrow Wilson Center for Scholars critiqued the work in Slavic Review, volume 53, number 1 (Spring 1994). He portrayed it as "the largest and most comprehensive reference work in its field." He concluded his review by stating, "The two volumes do represent a unique and most welcome contribution to the area of Slavic reference work and should be used profitably by both scholars and information specialists for years to come."

Croucher retired in August 2005 after twenty-five years as the Slavic Bibliographer at Indiana University, and almost a total of thirty-five years in the field of Slavic librarianship. Bibliographers and specialist librarians are unsung heroes. Their work is all too often anonymous, goes unnoticed, or is not properly credited by the scholarly community. Due to his expertise in the field, countless librarians, scholars, graduate and undergraduate students and just ordinary people consulted him from around the world, with many becoming his friends owing to his easygoing manner. He cheerfully accepted their numerous and varying challenges. His solid and competent work, as well as firm dedication to the profession, brought him hard-earned, widespread respect. Murlin Croucher took the often perceived position of a stuffy and bookish bibliographer and reshaped it into a true human face.

Gregory C. Ference, April 2006