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Phil Hoehn (far right), one of the 2016 Genie Award recipients

I first met Phil Hoehn when I profiled the library committee while it was doing one of its periodic shelf reads, in September 2019. Phil was part of that team. His role was to review the lists of potentially missing books and update the listing in WorldCat. When new books were discovered, Phil would add those to the catalog.

“The thing I really appreciated about Phil was that he knew libraries and he was just a very easy person to work with. He was very quiet, very gentle, very willing to help you with whatever you needed.” —Gibran Rath, Library Committee

In 2020 when I was working on the blog series about our collections, I went back to Phil to ask about our German and British resources. Phil was very responsive, knowledgeable, patient and very willing to answer all my basic questions. He was particularly helpful and knowledgeable about our map collection. Before joining CGS in 2012, Phil enjoyed an impressive career as a map librarian. He received a library degree from UC Berkeley after majoring in geography as an undergraduate at UCLA. Starting in 1969, Phil worked at the Bancroft Library on the UC Berkeley campus, and then transferred to the Doe Library, where he was the map librarian for the bulk of his career. After he retired from Berkeley, he was a map bibliographer at Stanford. The finale of his professional career was as the David Rumsey Map Collection’s librarian. After retiring Phil volunteered at the California Historical Society and we were fortunate to have him at CGS.

“He knew his stuff. He was a very meticulous, very professional, and very helpful giving almost instant responses to requests for help. I loved working with him.” —Wendy Polivka, Member Library Committee

A 2015 article from the California Historical Society explained that they had 45 drawers of flat sheet maps, some dating back to 1800. Phil spent four years researching, cataloging and rehousing their collection and making it accessible to researchers.

Phil joined the CGS Library Committee when he joined the society and made tremendous contributions in two areas. He researched and cataloged our map collection. If you search on WorldCat you’ll find 710 entries for maps available in our library that were catalogued by Phil. He also faithfully maintained our WorldCat data by entering new items, updating information as needed and adding links to items that are available online.

“Phil was good about moving ahead with all the changes we needed to make in order to keep up with current ways of doing things in our library.” —Arlene Miles, Library Committee

Phil Hoehn died on 6 February 2023 after battling cancer. He continued his volunteer service to the library committee until one month before his death.