Anna Marie “Maura” King Buri was born in Ireland in 1933 and immigrated to the US in 1958. She started working in the Villanova Law Library shortly after its construction and stayed for 54 years. She met her husband Bill at Villanova and raised a family in Conshohocken. In the early years of Villanova Law School, the library was ground zero and the books were the heart of the library. Maura guarded them fiercely. For many years she was in charge of the “Periodicals Room” that housed and protected current issues of law reviews, and she worked personally with individual students to obtain resources they needed. She made arrangements with the Geiser Family Binding Company of Philadelphia for permanent binding of law review volumes. In 1980 she was the first to try the new microform reader with the complete Legal Resource Index.
By then law reviews were available on Westlaw and the print issues were less critical, so Maura moved upstairs to work at the circulation desk where she guarded reserve materials just as fiercely and served students just as well. When she retired in 2013 she was the only person in law school history who had worked with every faculty and staff member since the law school’s inception. She was also a walking archive of memories about 50 years of law students, including Professor Doris Brogan who was a law student here in Maura’s third decade. Those who knew her valued her dedication and determination, her Irish manners and memories, and her embrace of diversity at Villanova. For many it is hard to imagine the Villanova Law Library without her.
