Frances Neel Cheney

Frances Neel Cheney (August 19, 1906 – May 5, 1996) was an American librarian, professor, and prolific reviewer of reference books. She graduated from Vanderbilt University and served in a number of professional positions at the school, including as an instructor at the Peabody Library School. She also worked for the Library of Congress and the Japan Library School at Keio University. She is best known as the author of the "Current Reference Books" column in the Wilson Library Bulletin, which she wrote for thirty years, as well as for her textbook, Fundamental Reference Sources, that became a standard in the field. She is remembered as one of the foremost reviewers of reference books and a significant figure in the history of reference instruction.

Early life and education Frances Neel Cheney was born on August 19, 1906 in Washington, D.C. to Thomas Meeks Neel, a mechanical engineer, and Carrie Tucker Neel, the niece of the confederate soldier, Sam Davis. The family moved frequently: first to Fitzgerald, Georgia from 1911 to 1913, then to Pittsburgh for the next six years where Cheney attended Wilkinsburg Public Schools, and finally to Newberry, South Carolina, her father's birthplace, where she attended high school. Cheney's father had an unsuccessful career in agriculture and died of pneumonia in February 1927.

Cheney enrolled in Vanderbilt University, her father's alma mater, in the fall of 1924, with the intention to study social work. She managed the Tri-Delt sorority house. At Vanderbilt, Cheney studied under Donald Davidson and John Crowe Ransom, members of the Fugitives literary movement. Ultimately, however, she graduated with her BA in sociology in 1928. She taught for a year at the newly-founded Japan Library School at Keio University in Tokyo. While there, she helped compile An Annotated List of Selected Japanese Reference Materials with Yukiko Monji. She went on to review reference books for Reference Services Review and American Reference Books Annual. John David Marshall, who compiled a bibliography of Cheney's work in 1983, put her total at nearly 8000 reference books reviewed across all three publications. A 1986 article in American Libraries estimated that she had written over 10,000 reviews.

In 1971, Cheney published Fundamental Reference Sources, a popular textbook for reference instruction. She coauthored a second edition in 1980 with Wiley J. Williams.

Personal life and politics Cheney and her husband, the novelist Brainard Cheney, maintained close friendships with many prominent figures of literature from the South, including Allen Tate, Caroline Gordon, Robert Penn Warren, and Flannery O'Connor.

Her work influenced figures in library science including William Katz, who claimed he "learned everything I know from Cheney, and a bit from [Louis] Shores." John V. Richardson lists Cheney's reference textbook, Fundamental Reference Sources; along with those by James Wyer, Louis Shores, Margaret Hutchins, and William Katz; as one of the standard texts in the history of reference education up to 1980.