The University Library honors the memory of William H. Mischo, who passed away on April 20, 2025. Bill was a legendary figure among his colleagues—an innovator, mentor, and leader whose influence shaped not only the Grainger Engineering Library Information Center, but also the very systems through which countless users have discovered knowledge. His decades of service leave a lasting impact on the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and throughout the wider world of library and information science. An excerpt from his obituary follows.
William H. Mischo began as Head of the Engineering Library in Engineering Hall in 1982 at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. He developed science and technology library collections, worked with faculty to understand their research, and was a role model for other librarians on campus.
Bill was perhaps best known for the planning and construction of the world-class Grainger Engineering Library Information Center (GELIC), which opened on March 14, 1994, and is the northernmost landmark on the Bardeen Quad. Bill trained hundreds of new STEM librarians and information professionals who work around the world.
Soon after Grainger opened, Bill was a Principal Investigator on the Digital Library Initiative I (DLI-I), a National Science Foundation-funded grant in which research was developed to create digital journals and was a major change for information delivery. In 1999, some of the very first Digital Object Identifiers (DOI), which are used to create unique identifiers for articles, books, chapters, and conferences, and are used to discover and connect information on the Web, were first created in GELIC.
Bill earned a reputation for developing innovative systems to make data accessible to end users. He created the campus’s digital portal and the “Easy Search” gateway software, a cornerstone of the University Library’s search and discovery strategy. His expertise led to his being named a 2015 Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) for “research relevant to the development of new digital library technologies.”
Mischo was named the inaugural holder of The Berthold Family Professorship in Information Access and Discovery in 2015, a research endowment given by Carol Berthold.
Bill was a 1967 graduate of Hartford Union High School, Hartford, Wisconsin, and he earned a bachelor’s degree in mathematics from Carthage College in 1971 and a master’s degree in library and information science from the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 1974. In 2009, he received the Frederick G. Kilgour Award for Research in Library and Information Science from the American Library Association; in 2017, he took on additional leadership duties for a year as acting dean of libraries and university librarian.
Bill semi-retired in 2022 and served as an emeritus professor and bibliometrics and information research librarian and as The Berthold Family Professor Emeritus in Information Access and Delivery. He continued to do research on bibliometrics and transaction log analysis to improve user systems.
