For more than 20 years MAHSLIN, our state medical library professional association, has been dedicated to providing and facilitating access to health information resources and services. MAHSLIN has established its "Hall of Fame" to recognize their performance and leadership of members and supporters of the health sciences library community. This year we are inducting a person who has broken the mold and set a shining example for all of us. This exceptional person is Gale Cogan.

Gale Cogan was born in Worcester, Mass., and educated at the University of Massachusetts Amherst where she graduated Cum Laude. She earned her Masters of Library Science degree in 1974 at Simmons College School of Library Science. In 1979 she was lured away from a job with a Boston accounting firm by the challenge of developing a health sciences library at St. Johns Hospital in Lowell. When she arrived there, a nurse was in charge of what was called the library. Gale developed this rudimentary library into a first class collection with first class service to the medical community at St. Johns. She retired from St. Johns in 1994 but consulted at St. Joseph's Library in Nashua NH for the next two years.

We always knew Gale was a terrific librarian and what comes next proves we were right. In December 1997 Gale and her husband visited Vietnam and Cambodia as tourists. Shortly after their visit she met Bernie Krisher, the retired Southeast Asian Bureau Chief for Newsweek. As a retirement project he had decided to aid what he thought was the neediest country in Southeast Asia, Cambodia. With millions of dollars of donations from Japan and the United States, he built the Sihanouk Hospital, Center of Hope, in Phnom Penh. HOPEWORLDWIDE undertook the management of the hospital which gives free medical treatment to the poor people of Cambodia 24 hours a day, seven days a week.

When Mr. Krisher met Gale and her husband, he bemoaned the fact that they had no medical library in this hospital. "That's easy, Bernie. I'll build you one," said Gale…and the rest is history.

Gale contacted her two former library consortia, NECHI and BBLC, and pleaded her cause. She wrote an article for the MAHSLIN newsletter, listed her needs on various Internet web sites, and spoke up at any and all occasions to acquire books and journals. She has had tremendous success.

After she had shipped over 70 cartons of library materials to the hospital, she decided she should go to Cambodia and see what had happened to the materials. Her husband refused to return to Cambodia because conditions there were so abysmal. So Gale went by herself in June 1998. She spent two weeks there training a Khmer librarian, cataloguing the collection, and putting it all in order. Everyone was delighted with the new hospital library.

Since then she has been sending materials to the hospital in Cambodia regularly. She has been so successful that the Japanese have asked her to build a library for the pediatric hospital they built in Siem Reap, where the Angkor temples are. Any surplus books are being sent to other provincial government hospitals. She also sends dental books and journals to the Dental School in Phnom Penh. Many areas in Cambodia will now have their first access to English language medical books and Western medicine. Through Gale Cogan's initiative, drive, and vision, the people of Cambodia in general, and Phnom Penh in particular, are receiving current, solid Western medicine. We have done our part in sending library materials to Gale, but she has spearheaded this project. For her lifetime of achievement culminating in her stellar work in Cambodia, we welcome Gale Cogan into the MAHSLIN Hall of Fame.

P.S. Gale can still use all medical and dental books and journals from 1995 to the present!

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