Coral, Lenore.

Music librarian, musicologist.

Lenore Coral received a B.A. in Music and an M.A. in Library Science from the University of Chicago, and a Ph.D. in Musicology from King's College, University of London in 1974, under the direction of Thurston Dart. She became the founding librarian of the Fine Arts collection at the University of California at Irvine in 1967, then served as music librarian at the University of Wisconsin and, from 1982, as music librarian and adjunct professor of music at Cornell until her death in 2005. She was the pre-eminent expert on British auction and sale catalogues, the subject of her dissertation; the book British Book Sale Catalogues, 1676-1800: A Union List, which she wrote in collaboration with A.N.L. Munby, remains the standard reference in the field.

As a librarian, she collaborated in the development of international standards for the bibliographic description of music and was founder and director of the U.S. Office of RILM (International Repertory of Music Literature), a scholarly resource devoted to indexing and abstracting the literature of music. She was influentially active on an extraordinary number of national and international committees in the library world, and wrote widely on copyright law, the cataloging of music, the management of music libraries, and numerous other issues in librarianship. She served as president of the Music Library Association and on the boards of directors of the International Association of Music Libraries and the American Musicological Association.

At Cornell she presided over the music library, taught a seminar introducing students to the skills required to do original research in music, mentored generations of students, attended hundreds of concerts, and was active in nearly every aspect of the Department of Music's many activities. She was instrumental in designing a new space for the music library when Lincoln Hall was renovated in 2000.