An avid traveler and student, Ida spent a total of more than three years living in Mexico, where she worked in libraries and collected plants.
[3] Grants from the National Science Foundation, the American Philosophical Society, and the U.S. Office of Education helped finance her trips.
In 1964 she published A Selected Guide to the Literature on Mexican Flowering Plants, a thousand-page compendium of more than twenty thousand entries.
[1] She published numerous articles in both English[4] and Spanish[5] and worked as a bibliographer at the Hunt Institute for Botanical Documentation of Carnegie Mellon University.
[3] She was a member of the Women's International League for Peace and Freedom, the Botanical Club of Philadelphia, and after retiring, moved to Atlantic City, where she volunteered for the American Civil Liberties Union.