Sheila Schaffer, who died on 30 December at the age of 82, came to Brighton with husband Bernard when he was appointed Reader in Politics at the University in the mid 1960s.
She became a mature student at the (then) Brighton Library School and came on a placement to work in the University Library in 1967. On completing the course, she joined the Library staff and was a valued member of the Library for almost 25 years.
Most of that time, over two decades, she was involved in the Documents Collection that was created within the Library in 1970 to house official publications of Europe and the UK and to collect the grey literature and pressure-group material of those decades, making this material available to research workers and students.
Those were the final decades of life before electronic publishing and electronic indexing. Many former (and some present) academic staff will recall the knowledgeable and supportive service that Sheila provided to faculty and generations of postgraduate and undergraduate students.
A considerable proportion of the entries in the Library computer catalogue covering this group of material was generated by Sheila. The records live on for future research in what will become a historical perspective on the political and social structure of the 1970s and the 1980s.
During her last years in the Library Sheila was directly involved in the provision of social sciences material for undergraduate courses and again had supportive contact with faculty in those subject areas.
Typically, Sheila chose her retirement date to coincide with the run-up to the European elections of 1992 so that she could assist in canvassing for the local Labour candidate. She had a distinguished ten-year political career in local Brighton politics and on behalf of the pensioners of Brighton.
David Kennelly, former Assistant Librarian