Minnie James

Minnie Stewart Rhodes James (7 July 1865 – 5 June 1903) was a chief librarian in London's East End and an author. She was one of the first women to lead a major library and published her ideas on the subject. She went to work for the Library Bureau and moved to work at their head office in Massachusetts.

Life James was born in 1865 and within a year her mother Sophia Helen (born Courthope) had died. Her father Henry Haughton James who had been in the Indian Navy married again 1867 and he and Annie (born Sparkes) had two more children making a total of five. It was a new design by Edward Robert Robson and it was heated by hot water and lit by gas. The octagonal library was based on the Prior's Kitchen of Durham Cathedral and it could hold 250,000 books. It boasted that it employed women librarians at the suggestion of Sir Edmund Hay Currie, who was the chair of the trustees, and Walter Besant. The first two women librarians were called Miss Black and Miss Low. She could see enormous opportunity for women in libraries, but she reported that there were "so few such women have been employed in British libraries in really responsible positions". She became ill that year but she would hold her position in Boston until her early death from typhoid fever in 1903.