Theodore M. (Mitchell) Finney was born on March 14, 1902, in Fayette, Iowa, and died in Pittsburgh on May 19, 1978. He studied at the University of Minnesota, where he received his BA in 1924, in Berlin at the Stern Conservatory and the University (1927–28), and at the University of Pittsburgh, where he received a LittM in 1938. After serving on the music staff of Carleton College in Minnesota, he was appointed professor and chair of the Music Department at the University of Pittsburgh in 1936. Among his many accomplishments at the university, he founded the Heinz Chapel Choir in 1938. Finney was the first to envision a music research library for the University of Pittsburgh and built the core collection through various means, including donation of his own collection. He retired in 1968 and became curator of the Warrington Collection of Hymnology at the Pittsburgh Theological Seminary. His career covered a wide range of musical interests: performance, scholarship, music education, and librarianship.

The Theodore M. Finney Music Library contains a music research collection to support the PhD programs in musicology, ethnomusicology, composition/theory, and jazz studies, as well as several collections of important musical materials. Collections include early American hymnals and tunebooks, volumes of sheet music with regional significance, and music belonging to the conductor William Steinberg. Among its archival holdings are the Nek Mirskey Collection (performance parts for silent films and salon orchestra music), the Polish Singers Alliance of America Collection (choral and instrumental music used by Polish singing societies), the Johnny Masters Collection (printed and manuscript music, and song sheets used by Johnny Masters and His Orchestra between 1949 and 1956. The library holds an impressive collection of facsimiles of composer’s manuscripts and medieval manuscripts.