Helen Louise Brownson

Helen Louise Brownson (1917-2017) was an American documentalist.

Helen Brownson

Life

Helen Louise Brownson was born on May 1, 1917 in Kansas City, KS. She graduated in Spanish at the University of Kansas in 1938. After working in the coffee trade she moved to Washington, DC, and held a series of positions in the Federal government.

Brownson was Secretary to the chairman of the Committee on Medical Research of the World War II Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), headed by Vannevar Bush (1942-46), from 1942 to 1947. Then until 1951 she was Secretary to the Special Committee on Technical Information of the Research and Development Board, also headed by Vannevar Bush, in the Department of Defense. In 1951 she joined the National Science Foundation where she as Assistant for Program Development, in the Office of Scientific Information (1951–1954) and then Program Director for Scientific Documentation (1954–1966). From 1966 until retirement in 1970 she worked Projects Administrator in the field of Information Processing in the Research Department of the Central Intelligence Agency.

She retired June 30, 1970, volunteered at the Smithsonian Institution, and died on August 5, 2017.

Contributions

Helen Brownson was influential because she set the funding pattern of the National Science Foundation's Office Scientific Information, including the Aslib Cranfield research project.

She also played a significant role in three important reviews of developments developments in documentation and information science:

• Current Research and Development in Scientific Documentation Washington, DC: National Science Foundation, 15 vols, 1957-1969. [1]
• Nonconventional Scientific and Technical Information Systems in Current Use Washington, DC: National Science Foundation, 4 vols, 1958-1966.
• Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, 1- (1968- ). [2]

Publications

Google Scholar lists several publications [3]

• "Recommendations and results of international conferences on scientific information and bibliographic services." American Documentation 3, no. 1 (1952): 29-55.
• "Coordination of information services." Library Trends 2, no 1 (Summer 1953): 127-145. [4]
• "Survey of operations and finances of scientific journals." With R. Tumbleson. Science 119, no. 3090 (1954): 357-359.
• "Research on Handling Scientific Information: Improvements in communication and information handling contribute to scientific progress." Science 132, no. 3444 (1960): 1922-1931.
• "Evaluation of document searching systems and procedures. Journal of Documentation 21, no 4 (1965): 261–266.

Further reading

• Tina J. Jayroe. "Homage to Helen Brownson: Information science pioneer." Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 49 (2013): 4-1. [5]
• Tina J. Jayroe. "A humble servant: The work of Helen L. Brownson and the early years of information science research." Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 63, no 10 (2012): 2052-2061.