Shayne, Mette
Biography
Mette Shayne was born and raised in Denmark, where she earned a library degree in 1958. She came to the United States in 1958 to study library automation. After returning to Denmark, she met and married David Shayne, an American, and they returned to the U.S. to live in 1960.
Mette Shayne joined the staff of the Northwestern University Library in 1961, working part-time in the circulation department and then the reference department. In 1964 she began working part-time in the Africana Library, gradually increasing her hours until she became a full-time staff member in that department in 1979, with responsibility for acquisitions of books and journals from French-speaking Africa. In 1980. she began working half-time in Africana and half-time in the Reference Department, where she served as liaison to several academic departments, including Anthropology, African and Asian Languages, French and Italian, Linguistics, and Performance Studies. She retired from the Northwestern University Library, after 38 years, on October 31, 1999.
Shayne's involvement in the African Studies Association's Archives/Library Committee--later known as the Africana Librarians Council—(ALC) began in 1981, when she participated in a panel on acquisitions from francophonic Africa. Her involvement in the ALC increased over the years to include participation and leadership roles in multiple committees. In 1982, she became involved in one of the organization's most ambitious and longest-running projects, the Co-operative African Microform Project (CAMP). Founded in 1963, CAMP was a collaborative effort among many institutions (partially funded by the Center for Research Libraries) to make rare and ephemeral African resources more widely available. Related to CAMP were two other initiatives that Shayne worked on: the Small Country Project and the French Africa-Related Journals Project, which involved locating institutions with holdings of relevant materials. In addition to the CAMP sub-committee, Shayne was extensively involved with the Bibliography Committee, which she chaired in 1997. She also served on the Nominating Committee, the Fortieth Anniversary of the ALC Committee (1997), the Journal Indexing Committee, the Electronic Records Task Force, and the Cataloging Committee. Shayne was elected Secretary of the ALC in 1988, holding this office through 1992. She served on the Nominating Committee in 1993.