Katharine MacDonald Jones was inducted into the Wisconsin Library Hall of Fame on October 23, 2013 at the annual conference of the Wisconsin Library Association in Green Bay, WI. Jones was a national authority on the selection of materials for small public libraries. She joined the staff of the Wisconsin Free Library Commission (WFLC) in 1899, and served as Assistant Secretary of the Commission from 1901 to 1907. She became head of the Traveling Libraries Department of the WFLC when it was established in 1903. From 1906 until 1908 she was editor of the Booklist of the American Library Association. She was identified in 1936 by Wisconsin Library Hall of Fame member Matthew S. Dudgeon as one of ten individuals on “Wisconsin’s long library Roll of Honor.” Dudgeon said this about Jones: “the talented appraiser of books who for years, with little enough support, carried on here in Wisconsin the splendid beginnings of the American Library Association Booklist.” Jones graduated from the University of Wisconsin in 1886. She was author of the publication Magazines for Small Libraries (WI Free Library Commission, 1908).
The Wisconsin Library Hall of Fame is a project of the Wisconsin Library Heritage Center which is a program of the Wisconsin Library Association Foundation.