Anne Carroll Moore
| Anne Carroll Moore | |
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| Born | July 12, 1871 Limerick, Maine, US |
| Died | January 20, 1961 (aged 89) New York City, New York, US |
| Other names | ACM, Annie Carroll Moore |
| Known for | Pioneer children's librarian and book critic |
Anne Carroll Moore (July 12, 1871 – January 20, 1961) was an American educator, writer and advocate for children's libraries. She was named Annie after an aunt, and officially changed her name to Anne in her fifties, to avoid confusion with Annie E. Moore, another woman who was also publishing material about juvenile libraries at that time. From 1906 to 1941 she headed children's library services for the New York Public Library system. Moore wrote Nicholas: A Manhattan Christmas Story, one of two runners-up for the 1925 Newbery Medal.
Moore was born in Limerick, Maine, the youngest of 7 older brothers and the only surviving daughter of Luther Sanborn and Sarah Barker Moore. She described her childhood as a happy one and wrote about growing up in My Roads to Childhood. Moore began her formal education at the Limerick Academy in Maine. She then attended a two-year college, The Bradford Academy in Massachusetts. She was very close to her father and hoped to follow in his footsteps as a lawyer, despite the biases of her era.
When the death of both her parents and a sister-in-law made her plans to become a lawyer unattainable, she spent several years helping her now widowed brother Harry raise his two children. Her brother suggested that she consider the emerging profession of librarian, so Moore applied to the State Library School in Albany, N.Y., but lacked the program's educational requirements. Undaunted, she then applied to the Pratt Institute Library in Brooklyn where she was accepted into the one-year program (1895) under Mary Wright Plummer.
In 1896 Moore graduated from Pratt, and accepted an offer to organize a children's room at that same institute, partly due to a paper which Lutie E. Stearns had presented at the 1894 meeting of the American Library Association (ALA), "Report on the Reading of the Young". Up to this point children had usually been considered a nuisance in library settings, and often were excluded from libraries until they were at least 14 years of age. As part of her research into the proposed children's room, Moore visited kindergartens (also a new concept at the time), toured various ethnic neighborhoods in the area, and even questioned children whom she encountered on the street. Moore then set out to create a welcoming space for children with child-sized furniture, open stacks, cozy reading nooks, story times, puppet shows, summer programming, quality juvenile literature and perhaps most importantly, librarians committed to working with children. When Moore opened the children's room it drew a line of children circling the block awaiting entry.
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