Jean Gérard

Jean Gérard (1890-1956) was a French chemist and documentalist.

Life

Jean Gérard was born in 1890. He studied chemistry in Nancy and worked in the university library during his studies. During the First World War worked on poisonous gases in the Service chimique de guerre. In 1918 he became (and remained for 25 years) the first secretary general of the International Union for Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) headquartered at the Maison de la Chimie in Paris. [1] Gérard's involvement in the Société de chimie industrielle (SCI) and the IUPAC led to a committee on documentation, then an Office international de chimie (OIC) and finally a center for chemical documentation (Centre de documentation chimique). With the support of Julien Cain, Gérard and others founded the l’Union française des offices de documentation (UFOD) in 1932 with Gérard as founding president. He died in 1956.

Contributions

The International Union of Pure and Applied Chemistry (IUPAC) was founded in 1919 and headquartered in Paris in the Maison de la Chemie. [2]. From the start, the Maison de la Chimie project was led by the French, most conspicuously by Jean Gérard, general secretary of the Société de chimie industrielle and of the IUPAC. Gérard's contribution to a number of national and international committees, notably for scientific documentation, left an enduring legacy. (Fauque 2011 & 2016)

Gérard was a co-founder of the Union Française des Organismes de Documentation (UFOD). He also proposed a World Organisation of Universal Documentation which would rival the International Institute for Documentation led by Paul Otlet.

Publications

• "Coordination des organismes de documentation : Liaison entre les groupements nationaux, Offices internationaux, Union internationale de documentation. Documentatio universalis : Bulletin de l’IIB, 4 (1931), 169-171.
• Allocution, Journées nationales de documentation, Paris, 6-7 juin 1952. La Documentation française 20, no 3 (mai-juin 1952): 6-9.

Offices

• President, International Confederation of Students.
• General Secretary, International Union for Pure and Applied Chemistry.
• Secretary General, International Union of Chemistry (Secretary General).
• Director, International Chemistry Office housed in the Maison de la Chemie in Paris. [3].
• Co-founder, Union Française des Organismes de Documentation (UFOD).

Further reading

• Rayward, W. Boyd. The Universe of Information: The Work of Paul Otlet for Documentation and International Organisation. FID 520. Moscow: VINITI for FID. [4]
• Fauque, Danielle M. E. "French Chemists and the International Reorganisation of Chemistry after World War I." Ambix 58, no 2 (2011): 116–135. [5]
• Wikidata [6]
• Fauque, Danielle M. E. "La documentation au cœur de la réorganisation de la chimie dans l’entre-deux-guerres : Rôle des sociétés savantes et institutions françaises dans le contexte international." Revue d’histoire des sciences 69, no 1 (2016): 41 à 75.
• Briet, S. "La science chimique et les livres. Une visite à la Maison de la Chimie." Archives et bibliothèques 11e année, no 2 (1936): 158-161.