Frank died Oct. 13, 2009, in New York City.

Frank attended William L. Dickinson High School in Jersey City, N.J., where he was a member of the National Honor Society. At Princeton he joined Court Club, belonged to Whig-Clio, and majored in the Special Program in Near Eastern Studies. Following several years of work-travel and study in London and the Middle East, Frank became a cataloging and acquisitions assistant for Middle East books at Columbia University. He earned a master’s degree in library science from Columbia in 1967 and remained there until his retirement in 2004.

Frank was a specialist in Middle Eastern studies, becoming the Middle East bibliographer for Columbia in 1969, a position expanded in 1993 to include Jewish studies. Through his efforts the collection at Columbia grew to include materials in Arabic, Turkish, Persian, Armenian, Kurdish, and Hebrew. His Middle East and Islamic resources included sources in Russia and Eastern Europe, Central Asia, Latin America, Australia, Japan, China, and South Asia.  

Columbia claims Frank’s collection of Maltese materials to be the best in the United States. Anticipating the importance of the Web, Frank developed the Middle East Web-resources collection, later becoming the “gold standard” Virtual Library for Middle East Studies.

Frank is survived by two sisters and several nieces and nephews.

Undergraduate Class of 1959