File OM/486 - Antonia Bunch papers

Toni (Antonia) Bunch was born on 13 February 1937 in Croydon, Surrey, England, to Harold and Helen Bunch (née Wilson). Having missed out on going to university when she left school, she took an alternative route to qualify for her chosen profession. After completing correspondence courses and attending classes at Ealing Technical College, she sat and passed the Library Association’s Associateship (ALA) examination in 1960 and subsequently worked in Scotland, spending most of her career in Edinburgh, where she specialised in medical librarianship.

From 1962-1965, Toni was employed as Assistant Librarian at the Scottish Office in Edinburgh. In 1965, she was appointed as Librarian at the Scottish Health Service Centre, where she remained until 1981, establishing its library as a national resource centre for information on all aspects of healthcare management and planning. Whilst working full-time, she completed a research thesis entitled ‘Hospital and medical libraries in Scotland: an historical and sociological study’, which she successfully submitted for the Fellowship of the Library Association (FLA) in 1973 and later published as an article in Scottish Library Studies 3 (1975).

Toni went on to register as a part-time research student at the University of Strathclyde in 1974, graduating in 1976 with the degree of Master of Arts for her thesis entitled ‘Health care administration: an information sourcebook’. The thesis was published by Capital Planning Information in 1979.

From August 1981 until 1986, Toni was employed as a Lecturer in the Department of Librarianship (known from 1985 as the Department of Information Science) at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow. She also enrolled as a part-time PhD student there in January 1982. The topic of her doctoral research was Scottish medical and scientific book collectors to the end of the eighteenth century, which she described as being a logical progression from the research undertaken for her FLA thesis in the early 1970s. In March 1987, however, she abandoned her doctoral studies without completing or submitting a thesis. That same year, she was appointed as Director of the newly created Scottish Science Library at the National Library of Scotland, Edinburgh, remaining in post until her retirement at the age of 59. She latterly lived in the village of Garvald, East Lothian, and died, aged 86 on 21 March 2023.

Toni was a Fellow of the Institute of Information Scientists, receiving its Jason Farradane Award in 1990; a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (a new body created when the Library Association merged with the Institute of Information Scientists in 2002); a Fellow of the Society of Antiquaries of Scotland, and a Council member of the Scottish Society for the History of Medicine. During her career, she served on several national and international committees concerned with librarianship and information science. She was appointed Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in 1996.