Eva J. O'Meara (1884–1979) was Yale University's first music librarian. During her long professional career she was a leading figure in national music library affairs, and was one of the founding members of the Music Library Association (along with Carleton Sprague Smith of the New York Public Library, Otto Kinkeldey of Cornell University, W. Oliver Strunk of the Library of Congress, Barbara Duncan of the Eastman School of Music, and George Dickinson of Vassar College). She served as editor of the first series of Notes (1934–1941), and for several years was the chair of MLA's Cataloging Committee. Her distinguished service to the profession was recognized by the association with the MLA Citation, presented to her in 1965.
Prior to her years at Yale, O’Meara worked in the public libraries of Seymour and Derby, Connecticut, the McGill University Library, and the private library of the Dean of the Faculty of Arts at McGill. In 1914, she began work as an assistant in the Catalog Department of the Yale University Library. Among her many duties was the cataloging of a backlog of music. In 1917, when the Yale School of Music moved into Sprague Hall, the dean, Horatio Parker, requested help in establishing a music library. Given O'Meara's experience in cataloging music, the assignment fell to her, at first part time, but beginning in 1924 full time, and she remained the music librarian until her retirement in 1952. Her main activity in the early years was to bring together about 2,000 volumes of books and scores that had been acquired by the School of Music, 600 volumes of collected works and Denkmäler from the University Library, and the remarkable private library of Lowell Mason, consisting of 10,300 volumes.
After her retirement, at the initiative of Ralph Kirkpatrick, she was honored by friends and colleagues in 1974 on the occasion of her ninetieth birthday by the establishment at the Music Library of an endowed book fund for the purchase of reference materials. O’Meara’s last public appearance was on October 6, 1979, when she spoke to an audience of sixty members of MLA's New England and New York City chapters on the founding of the Music Library Association.