Fremont Rider

Arthur Fremont Rider (May 25, 1885 – October 26, 1962) was an American writer, poet, editor, inventor, genealogist, and librarian. He studied under Melvil Dewey, of whom he wrote a biography for the American Library Association. Throughout his life he wrote in several genres including plays, poetry, short stories, non-fiction and an auto-biography which he wrote in the third-person. In the early 20th century he became a noted editor and publisher, working on such publications as Publishers Weekly and the Library Journal. In 1933 he became a librarian at Wesleyan University, eventually becoming director of the university's Olin Memorial Library and afterwards founding the Godfrey Memorial Library of genealogy and history in 1947. For his contributions to library science and as a librarian at Wesleyan University he was named one of the 100 Most Important Leaders of Library Science and the Library Profession in the twentieth century by the official publication of the American Library Association.

Early life and education Arthur Fremont Rider was born in Trenton, New Jersey on May 25, 1885. His parents were George Arthur Rider and Charlotte Elizabeth Meader Rider. The family was originally from Middletown, Connecticut, and Rider reports in his biography that his birth in New Jersey was an “accident” resulting from his father's frequent business trips to that state, on this occasion having brought his wife. Later in life Rider dropped his first name “for somewhat the same reasons that Joseph Rudyard Kipling did,” becoming known simply as Fremont Rider. While working at The Delineator he wrote his first book, Are the Dead Alive in which he attempted to present the case for psychical research, and in general was what Rider believed to be an objective approach to the popular subject of “Spiritualism.” At the height of the Great Depression Rider published an article in The North American Review in which he identified the class warfare promoted by industrial unions as the principal cause of the labor troubles, although he admitted that the solution to the problem of “poverty amidst plenty” was not to cut back on production, but to increase wages, and so “increase purchasing power” of those who would buy the products of industrial and agricultural industry. After World War II Rider wrote a short book in which he advocated for a true One-World government. His proposed solution for the question of legislative power allotted to the various nation participants was one based on an “intellectual” index, that would translate, in his words, to “very real, but vaguely defined, concept that we call ‘national importance’.”

Legacy In 1933 Rider returned to Middletown to take a permanent librarianship position at Wesleyan. A year later the university awarded him a Masters ad eundum, Phi Beta Kappa. In The Scholar, he laid out the problem of increasing shortage of space in research libraries and described the microcard, a microform of his own invention being a 7 and a half by 12 and a half centimeter opaque card. Upon the catalogue, or front-side, would be the catalogue information. Upon the reverse, Rider wanted to reproduce “as many as 250 pages of an ordinary 12mo book on the back of a single card.” The idea was inspired by recent developments he had been following in the production and printing of micro-text, especially by the Readex Microprint Corporation. Rider envisioned that these microcards would serve both as the catalogue and collection, thus not only saving shelving space by eliminating books, but also doing away with the need to have a catalogue collection separate from manuscript collection. Researchers would search the catalogue for the entry they wished, and then having selected it would take the card to a reader machine which might be no bigger than a briefcase. Although he has since been proven wrong in his assertion that research libraries double in size every sixteen years, Rider's prediction that microform material would be employed to solve the issue of collection space and growth was prescient though at the time he could not have known that microform would in turn be superseded by the digital revolution. His idea that a library's catalogue and collection could be one and the same foreshadowed the possibilities opened by digital media collections. Rider was also noted for his controversial method of book shelving which involved shaving the books to make them fit in tighter spaces.

In addition, while director of Olin, Rider "started putting together the idea for a monumental index that would help genealogists all over the world in their research. That was the beginning of the American Genealogical Biographical Index (AGBI) and the Godfrey Memorial Library."