Pauline Atherton Cochrane

Pauline Atherton Cochrane (1929-2024) was an American librarian and author.

Pauline Cochrane

Life

Pauline Anna Blazina Atherton Cochrane was born in 1929 in Argo, Illinois. She studied at Lyons Township Junior College, 1947-1949, then at Illinois College, Jacksonville, Illinois, 1949-1951, where she earned a BA in social science. She received an MA in library science from Rosary College (now Dominican University), River Forest, Illinois, in 1954, followed in 1955 by doctoral study at the University of Chicago Graduate Library School.

Her first professional job was as an indexer at the Corn Products Refining Company, 1951-1953. She worked as school teacher, 1953-1954, as a reference librarian at the Chicago Public Library, 1954-1955, and as an assistant professor of library science at Chicago Teacher's College (later Chicago State University), 1956-1958, and an editor for World Book Encyclopedia. She was also active as a consultant.

In 1960 she was made Associate Director of the Documentation Research Project at the American Institute of Physics where she worked on A Project for the Development of a Reference Retrieval System for Physicists for the next four years. She differentiated how information retrieval would be performed by physicists as researchers versus physicists as authors using four facets which were in use at the American Institute of Physics until 2009. These facets were:

• property (being studied)
• object (of study)
• method (of inquiry)
• type of research (experimental, theoretical, or both).

Using bibliometrics, Cochrane was able to improve coverage of physics journals in Physics Abstracts using automated techniques.

She became a professor at the Syracuse University School of Information Studies for many years, retired in 2008, and died on July 29, 2024 in Arthur, Illinois.

Contributions

Cochrane was a leading researcher in the campaign to redesign catalogues and indexes to provide improved online subject access and a respected teacher and theorist of cataloging, indexing, and information access."

For the UNESCO UNISIST program she prepared guidelines for organizing training courses, workshops, and seminars in technical information and documentation.

Cochrane was a co-founder of the Classification Research Study Group in the late 1950s, a group devoted to "the intellectual/theoretical development of knowledge organization" based on Ranganathan's Library Research Circle in India and the Classification Research Group in England.

She edited the Handbook on Information Systems and Services for Developing Countries. She continued in her work to help librarians learn how to use "newer" technology to help patrons find information and created a six part continuing education series for the American Library Association's magazine American Libraries. Entitled Modern Subject Access in the Online Age [1]

Publications

Google scholar lists numerous items, some under Atherton, others under Cochrane.

• A test of the factor-analytically derived automated classification method applied to descriptions of work and search requests of nuclear physicists : report by Pauline Atherton and Harold Borko. 1965.
• Humanization of knowledge in the social sciences (1973) by Pauline A. Cochrane
• Putting knowledge to work an American view of Ranganathan's Five laws of library science. Delhi: Vikas Publishing House, 1973. [2]
• Interfaces in computer-based bibliographic searching. (1976) by Pauline A. Cochrane
• Handbook for information systems and services (1977) by Pauline Atherton
• Books are for use : final report of the subject access project to the Council on Library Resources. (1978) by Pauline Atherton
• "Modern subject access in the online age." American Libraries 15 (1984). [3]
• Librarians and online services (1978) by Pauline Atherton and Roger W. Christian,
• "An analysis of controlled vocabulary and free text search statements in online searches." With K. Markey & C. Newton. Online review 4, no. 3 (1980): 225-236.
• Improving LCC and DDC for use in online catalogs and shelflists. (1989) by Pauline A. Cochrane
• Visualizing Subject Access for 21st Century Information Resources: Papers Presented at the Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing. (1998) by Pauline A. Cochrane, Eric H. Johnson, and Sandra K. Roe, eds.

Offices

• American Society fr Information Science. Treasure, 1964-1965; President, 1971.
• National Academy of Sciences--National Research Council. Committee on International Scientific and Technical Information Programs (CISTIP).

Honors

• American Society for Information Science. Outstanding Information Science Teacher Award, 1981; Award of Merit, 1990.

Further reading

• Pauline Cochrane passes away. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, School of Information Sciences. (Obituary).[4]
• Saving the Time of the Library User Through Subject Access Innovation: Papers in Honor of Pauline Atherton Cochrane. Ed, by William Wheeler. Urbana, IL: University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, Graduate School of Library and Information Science, Publications Office, 2000. Includes 8 papers about her work and a curriculum vitae.
• "Pauline Atherton Cochrane," Wikipedia [5]]
• La Barre, Kathryn. "Pauline Atherton Cochrane: Weaving Value from the Past." Libraries & the Cultural Record 45, issue 2 (May 2010): 210–237. [6]
• La Barre, Kathryn. Weaving Webs of Significance: The Classification Research Study Group in the United States and Canada. In In W. Boyd Rayward & Mary Ellen Bowden (Eds). Proceedings of the 2002 conference on the History and Heritage of Scientific Information Systems, pp. 246-257. Medford, NJ: Information Today.
• Westin, Monica. "Ingenious librarians." Aeon 2023. [7] Includes photo.
• Who’s who in library service. 4th ed. Ed. by L. Ash. New York: Shoe String Pr., 1966, p. 22.

Papers

Syracuse University Library, Special Collections Department (Syracuse, NY). Pauline Atherton Cochrane Papers: personal/professional papers, 1966-1986; oral history interview of Cochrane. Finding aid [8]