Division XII / Commission 5 / Working Group Libraries

The IAU Working Group on Libraries was officially recognized for the first time in the Transactions of the IAU XXIA Reports on Astronomy (McNally 1991), but librarians were involved in Commission 5 activities before that (largely due to the efforts of George A. Wilkins, president of the Commission from 1982 to 1988, see Transactions of the IAU XXA Reports on Astronomy, Swings 1988). Wayne Warren (NASA GSFC, MD, USA) and Helen Knudsen (Calech, CA, USA) were the group's first chairpersons, Brenda Corbin (U.S. Naval Observatory) became Helen Knudsen's successor in 1990. Since 1996, Fionn Murtagh (School of Computer Science, Queen's University of Belfast, Northern Ireland) and Uta Grothkopf (European Southern Observatory, Germany) have been co-chairs.