Elva Bascom enrolled at Lake Erie College before she entered Alleghany College in 1890. There she became member of Kappa Alpha Theta’s Mu chapter.
She won the Arlie Mead Thoburn Essay Prize in 1893, graduated in 1894 and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa when the chapter was chartered on the campus in 1904. She had been active on the college publication, The Campus. After graduation in 1894, she started working in the editorial offices of the Chautauqua Century Press in Meadville, Pennsylvania.
Bascom loved books and library work interested her. In 1899, she went to Albany, New York, to study at the New York State Library school where she received a degree in library science. She remained at the state library editing and indexing publications. Two years were spent working on the American Library Association Catalog which was published in 1904.
In 1908, she was named editor of the ALA Booklist, the associations list to help librarians pick out books to purchase. A Theta who interviewed her for an article noted that Bascom had “to personally read 100 or more books a month and had to be responsible for every comment made.” When the work was transferred to Chicago in 1913, she chose to remain in Wisconsin as the head of book selection of the Wisconsin Library Commission.
In 1913, she wrote a manual, Book Selection, that was used in library schools to train librarians. The book was revised several times.
From Wisconsin she went to the University of Texas where she organized a library school. The January 1924, Kappa Alpha Theta included this note:
The Texas library association program for its 1923 meeting, San Antonio, November 26-28, sounds interesting even to a layman, and we note that for the year just closing this association has had as its energetic and inspiring president, Miss Elva L. Bascom, Mu , chairman department of library science at the University of Texas, and also chairman for Kappa Alpha Theta’s memorial alcove in DePauw University Library.
Bascom belonged to an alumnae chapter wherever she lived. It was said, she “never let her engrossing library duties keep her from gatherings of both college and alumnae chapters.” She and Theta Grand Council member L. Pearle Green were long time friends having met at the New York State Library School. They even shared a birthday.
She wrote an article in the magazine. It focused on the field of library work. According to Bascom, “The girl who is fortunate enough to possess good health, good sense, good education, enthusiasm, executive ability and personal charm – or a ‘pleasing personality’ – has the open sesame to anything the library profession has to offer to women – provided she is willing to work, and work hard.”
After six years on the University of Texas project, the budget was cut and she severed her relationship with the school and moved to Pittsburgh. There in 1925, she joined the library school at the Carnegie Institute of Technology in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania.
She compiled a list of 500 books for a Kappa Alpha Theta chapter house library and made this comment:
To select five hundred books for any group as large and as varied as our Kappa Alpha Theta chapters is a task that no one can envy the selector. The result will satisfy no one as a whole; no lit ever does, just as no anthology of poetry ever satisfies a poetry lover. But please do not criticize the list because it does not contain a books that was published after its compilation – which was the first criticism that arrived after the 200-title list was printed in 1933. Whatever may be lacking – and a great many good books are not here (500 is 500, after all, and there are thousands of good books) – here are books worth reading.
Pittsburgh Press, October 18, 1936
Ella Bascom’s last gig as a librarian began in 1937. She served at the Sunday School of the Church of the Covenant in Cleveland, Ohio. She died in Cleveland in 1944.
