Katharine Lucinda Sharp (May 21 or 25, 1865 – June 1, 1914) gained prominence as a pioneering librarian for her intense engagement with the library profession that spanned 19 years.

[7] Laurel Grotzinger, in her comprehensive biographical work on Sharp, notes that the details of her early upbringing, as well as her later internal personal motivations, remain relatively unknown.

[8] What is known is that her father remarried in 1880, and that Katharine had a somewhat close relationship with her half-brother from this marriage, Robert Nicholson Sharp, who died suddenly at the age of 25.

[30] From this formative phase of her career onward, she amassed a series of significant professional achievements, outlined in the Biography and Genealogy Master Index.

[33] Despite these significant later achievements, Grotzinger maintains that: "The establishment and development of a school for library training was the essential contribution of Katharine Sharp.

"[34] It is evident that Sharp constantly pushed for more stringent standards for service; for higher admission requirements to the school, and for developing a curriculum that was more than a superficial treatment of the variety of subjects encompassed by library science.

[44] Sharp then became a second vice-president and executive in the Lake Placid Club in the Adirondacks,[45] once again under the leadership of Melvil Dewey, whom some describe as her mentor [46] and others as part of her adopted family.

Her abrupt withdrawal from the library field is surprising in relation to the intensity and extent of her devotion to it, but Grotzinger proposes, as an explanation, several compelling precipitating factors.

The combination of the ongoing pressures of administration of both the Library and the School of Library Studies at the University of Illinois, with the usual constraints of lack of staff and insufficient budget, combined with the sudden death of her brother and father within a relatively short amount of time, may have caused Sharp to consider her need for personal fulfillment, something which she had up until then ignored, in favor of her career.

While out on an excursion with a wedding party at the Lake Placid Club, she was thrown from an automobile and suffered critical brain injuries, to which she eventually succumbed.