Barbara Simmons Miller papers

Barbara S. Miller, a Louisville resident, became a children's librarian in 1951 at the racially segregated Western Branch of the Louisville Free Public Library. Several years later, with a colleague, she integrated the professional staff at the Main Branch, ultimately advancing to Director of Children's Services. Miller gained early community-wide notoriety as the "Storytelling Lady" on the popular local children's television show T-Bar-V Ranch. After retirement in 1978 Miller served as President of the Kentucky Library Association, a member of the Spalding University Overseers (she was an alumna of Spalding) and the Speed Museum Board, and was active in several other local organizations. In 1987-1988, she was both an interviewer and subject on a grant funded oral history project on the Louisville Free Public Library. (Those interviews are part of the Oral History Center in the University Archives and Records Center.) In the 1990s Miller developed an extensive narrated slide presentation on the life of pioneering Black American missionary to Africa William H. Sheppard. In 1975 she visited European libraries as part of an American delegation and in 1979 traveled more extensively to the Soviet Union to study children's services. Barbara S. Miller died in Louisville on March 26, 2000 at age 90.