Chadron State has new library director

Milton Wolf is a native of McKeesport, Pa. After graduating from high school, he spent three years in Army intelligence in the early 1960s. He then attended Pennsylvania State University, where he was a Phi Beta Kappa graduate in English in 1968. He earned a master’s degree in library science from the University of Michigan the following year.

Wolf comes to Chadron State from the University of Central Florida, where he was head of collection management and also taught science fiction and fantasy in the honors college.

He also has been director of collection development at the University of Nevada at Reno, a humanities bibliographer at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, assistant director for technical processes at Wright State University in Dayton, Ohio, and an order and antiquarian librarian at Penn State.

In the latter position, his duties included locating out-of-print books. He once acquired 450,000 books by purchasing two bookstores in New York City. He also traveled to London to search for rare books.

Wolf has done extensive writing about science fiction and is friends with numerous science fiction authors. Dating back to 1980, he had nearly 100 articles published, including approximately 35 on science fiction that are printed in encyclopedias.

He has served as vice president of the Science Fiction Research Association, and hopes to encourage several well-known authors from that field to speak at Chadron State.

Wolf said he is impressed by the scenery in the region. “We live in beauty away from the pressures of population and pollution,” he said. “I think this area has great potential for attracting people who want to live in peace and harmony if we can provide them with electronic access to the information world.”

Wolf describes himself as an avid outdoorsman, so much so that while living in Nevada, where he had plenty of room, he has raised three wolves from the animal world.

He succeeds Terry Brennan, who was the college’s library director for 24 years before retiring in June 2004.