Margaret Mann (April 9, 1873 – August 22, 1960)[1] was a noted librarian and teacher who influenced the field of cataloging for almost fifty years.

While Mann was known throughout her career for her breadth of knowledge and contributions to academia, it is worthy to mention that she never formally achieved more than a high school diploma.

Because her family was of modest means, Margaret or "Maggie" was strongly persuaded to attend the vocational school that had just opened near her home in Chicago.

Mann's interests started to expand beyond library science as she began to hone her teaching skills as a senior instructor at the University of Illinois.

Her work there created quite a reputation for her career; her particular talent for both supervising and classifying in ostensibly "insurmountable difficulties was and remains, one of the finest of its kind".

The former was recognized as the primary teaching text almost "before it was published and remains, even today, a major guide to the principles of cataloging and classification.".

[1] Public service was at the heart of her philosophy of librarianship, "Here one turns his attention, not to gratifying his own hunger for literature, but to the far broader task of studying, recording, and interpreting books so that they may reach the thousands of readers who are in search of reading matter of various kinds and for various persons".