Jesse Hauk Shera

Jesse Hauk Shera (1903-1982) was an American librarian and academic.

Life

Jesse Hauk Shera was born on December 8, 1903 in Oxford, Ohio. He received a B.A. in English literature from Miami(Ohio) University in 1925, and an M.A. in English from Yale in 1927. He entered the library profession immediately after his graduation from Yale, and in 1944 earned a Ph.D. from the Graduate Library School (GLS) of the University of Chicago.

In 1947, after brief servive with the Central Information Division of the Office of Strategic Services, Shera joined the faculty of the GLS. By 1951, he was appointed dean of the School of Library Science (SLS) at Western Reserve University (WRU) in Ohio. Shera expanded and improved the SLS program, and forged a link between the school and the fields of documentation and special librarianship.

He was a charter member of the American Documentation Institute, and in 1953 became editor of the Institute's journal American Documentation, a position he held for seven years. In 1955 Shera established, with the help of James Whitney Perry and Allen Kent, the Center for Documentation and Communication Research (CDCR). The CDCR became a pioneer in the emerging field of information retrieval. As a result of Shera, Perry and Kent's work, the school not only received research grants, but was also the recipient of "the first operational system for the mechanized retrieval of information," the GE 225 general-purpose computer. These and other achievements, notably his prolific writing, brought Shera international recognition.

Despite his successes in the field of documentation, Shera eventually began to rethink his belief that information science could provide the "intellectual and theoretical foundations of librarianship." He believed librarians had to look beyond the "mechanized access to data banks or networks" to find the underpinnings of library theory.

Employment

Central Information Division of Office of Strategic Services, Washington, DC.
Faculty member at the University of Chicago Graduate Library School.
Western Reserve University, Cleveland, OH.

Contributions

Shera wrote a column for the Wilson Library Bulletin. At OSS, he experimented with techniques for indexing. He was Dean Emeritus, Baxter School of Information and Library Science, Western Reserve University. He was the leading authority on documentation, classification, and history of American libraries. He dedicated his career to enhancing the status of librarianship. Shera served in editorial capacity for Library Quarterly, American Documentation, and Journal of Cataloging and Classification. With Shera's help the library school at WRU became a center of advanced ideas and techniques in librarianship. While at the Center for Documentation and Communications Research at WRU, Shera, along with Perry, devoted their research to defining new information science and serving the needs of Cold War research. His Introduction to Library Science (1986) is still one of the world's most widely-used texts, and it has been translated into many languages, including Russian.

Publications

Introduction to library science: basic elements of library service. Littleton, CO: Libraries Unlimited, 1976 ISBN 0-87287-173-8
Knowing books and men; knowing computers too. Littleton, CO: Libraries Unlimited, 1973 ISBN0-87287-073-1
The foundations of education for librarianship. New York: Becker and Hayes 1972 ISBN 0-471-78520-2
"The complete librarian"; and other essays. Cleveland: Press of Western Reserve University, 1971, 1979 ISBN 0-8295-0193-2
Sociological foundations of librarianship. New York: Asia Pub. House 1970. ISBN 0-210-22283-2
Documentation and the organization of knowledge. Hamden, CT: Archon Books, 1966
Libraries and the organization of knowledge. London: Lockwood 1965
An epistemological foundation for library science. Cleveland: Press of Western Reserve University, 1965
Information resources: a challenge to American science and industry. Cleveland: Press of Western Reserve Univ. 1958
The classified catalog: basic principles and practices. Chicago: American Library Association, 1956
Documentation in action / Jesse H. Shera, Allen Kent, James W. Perry [editors]. New York : Reinhold Publishing Corp., 1956.
Historians, books and libraries: a survey of historical scholarship in relation to library resources, organization and services. Cleveland: Press of Western Reserve University, 1953
Bibliographic organization. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1951
Foundations of the public library: the origins of the public library movement in New England, 1629–1855. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1952, 1949
"An eddy in the western flow of America culture." Ohio state archæological and historical quarterly 1935.
"The age factor in employment, a classified bibliography." Bulletin of bibliography and dramatic index. Boston, MA: Boston Book Co., 1931-32.

Offices

Association of American Library Schools, President, 1964-65.
Ohio Library Association, President, 1963-64.

Awards

ALA Medal of Excellence|Melvil Dewey Medal (1968). American Library Association.
Award of Merit - Association for Information Science and Technology|Award of Merit (1973).
Joseph W. Lippincott Award.(1973). American Library Association.
American Library Association Honorary Membership, 1976.
Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1982).

Papers

Case Western Reserve University Archives, Cleveland, OH. Papers: 1912-1971; ca. 29 feet. Includes: Personal papers including correspondence, speeches, reports, conference papers, and publications relating to ALA conferences, Carnegie Study, Graduate Library School, University of Chicago, Ohio Library Association, Special Libraries Association, UNESCO conferences, and Documentation.