Wesley, Dorothy Porter, 1905-1995

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Dorothy Louise Porter Wesley (May 25, 1905 – December 17, 1995) was an African-American librarian, bibliographer and curator, who built the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center at Howard University into a world-class research collection.

Porter was born Dorothy Burnett in Warrenton, Virginia, the first of four children of Dr and Mrs Hayes J. Burnett.

Porter received a B.A. from Howard University in 1928. She studied at Columbia University, earning B.S. in 1931 and M.S. in 1932 in library science. She was the first African American to graduate from Columbia's library school.

She was appointed in 1930 and over the next 40 years was key to building up what is now the Moorland-Spingarn Research Center to be one of the world's best collection of library materials for Black history and culture at Howard University.[3] Her limited budget meant that she sometimes asked publishers and book dealers directly to donate specific books to the library. She developed a world-wide network of contacts that reached from the USA to Brazil, Mexico and Europe through friends including Alain Locke, Rayford Logan, Dorothy Peterson, Langston Hughes, and Amy Spingarn. The collection is thus international and in many languages and includes music and linguistics as well as literature and scholarship by and about Black people.[3] In addition, she was instrumental in ensuring scholars such as Edison Carneiro and statemen like Kwame Nkrumah and Eric Williams visited the university to increase student's interest in their African heritage.

In addition, the collection required a new cataloging system that she developed as well as expertise to assess the materials. Earlier librarians, notably Lula V. Allen, Edith Brown, Lula E. Connor and Rosa C. Hershaw had started to develop a system suitable for the library's materials. Porter built on this to highlight genre and authors rather than use the conventional Dewey Decimal Classification which lacked appropriate class-marks. When Arthur Spingarn agreed to sell his private collection to Howard University, the university's treasurer required an external appriasal of its value. Although Porter requested someone from the Library of Congress to do this, they lacked expertise in the subject area and asked her to write the report, that they then signed, and which was accepted by the university treasurer.