Madeline M. (Berry) Henderson

Madeline M. (Berry) Henderson (1922-2011) was an American information services specialist.

Madeline M. (Berry) Henderson

Life

Madeline Mary Berry (later, in 1957, Madeline Henderson) was born on September 3, 1922 in Merrimac, Massachusetts. She attended Emmanuel College, Boston, receiving an AB in chemistry in 1944. After college, she worked briefly with DuPont in explosives research and as a chemist for Harrington Research Labs in Quincy. She then accepted a position at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's (MIT) High Pressure Research Lab as a research associate.

In February 1950 her career took a major turn when she became as assistant to James W. Perry at MIT who was interested in information technology. She helped edit Punched cards: Their application to science and industry (1951) and was designated co-editor of the second edition (1958). She and Perry undertook a study of notational systems for structural formulas. They also thought about recording semantic relationships ("semantic factoring") and terse "telegraphic" abstracts during a contract with the CIA. In 1951 Allen Kent joined them. All three moved to Battelle Memorial Institute in Columbus, Ohio, in 1953. This very productive partnership ended when Perry and Kent moved to Western Reserve University (later Case Western Reserve University) to form the Center for Documentation and Communication Research.

In 1956 Henderson became an assistant to Helen Brownson, director of a new Program for Support and Scientific Documentation at the National Science Foundation, where she worked full-time 1956-1958 and part-time 1958-1962. There she compiled Current Research and Development in Scientific Documentation (15 issues, 1958-1969) and the first two issues of Nonconventional Technical Information Systems in Current Use (1958-1966). She then worked part-time, later full-time at the National Bureau of Standards. She retired in 1979 but remained active as an independent consultant until 1991. She died on July 17, 2011 in Frederick, Maryland.

Contributions

Madeline Henderson was highly influential through her research, writings, and professional activities. In particular, her work helped quite disparate information-related activities to form information science as a more coherent whole.

Publications

Google Scholar lists numerous publications, some under Berry [1] and others under Henderson. [2]

• Punched cards: Their applications to science and industry. 2nd ed. Ed. with R. S. Casey, J. W. Perry & A. Kent. New York: Reinhold, 1958.
• Cooperation, convertibility, and compatibility among information systems: A literature review. Withe others. Washington DC: US Govt Printing Office, 1966. National Bureau of Standards Miscellaneous Publication 276. [3]
• Evaluation of information systems: a selected bibliography with informative abstracts. Washington, DC: US Govt. Print. Off., 1967. [4]
• Automation and the Federal library community: report on a survey. With others. Washington: Federal Library Committee, 1973. [5]
• Oral history interview with Madeline M. Henderson. Philadelphia: Science History Institute, 1997. [6]

Offices

• American Association for the Advancement of Science. Secretary, 1978.

Awards

• American Society for Information Science. Watson Davis Award, 1989.
• American Institute of Chemists. Fellow, 1964.
• American Association for the Advancement of Science. Fellow,

Further reading

• Williams, R. V. "Madeline M. Henderson: From chemical information science pioneer to architect of the new information science." Libraries and the Cultural Record 45, no 2 (2010): 167-184. Biography.
• 1922 - Madeline - 2011. Brief obituary. Stauffer Funeral Homes, 2011. [7]