Frederick Wilfrid Lancaster
Wilfrid Lancaster (1933–2013) was British American information scientist.
Life
Frederick Wilfred Lancaster, widely known as "Wilf", was born on September 4, 1933 in Stanley, County Durham, England. He qualified as a librarian (as an Associate of the British Library Association) at what is now the University of Northumbria at Newcastle, England, and worked as a librarian in England from 1953 to 1959. He moved to the US in 1959 and worked was involved in the design and management of MEDLARS, the National Library of Medicine's computerized bibliographic retrieval system for articles in medicine and allied health professionsin Bethesda, Maryland, from 1965 to 1968. He then taught at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign Graduate School of Library and Information Science, from 1970 until retirement in 1992 and thereafter professor emeritus until he died on August 25, 2013 in Urbana, Illinois.
Contributions
Lancaster's principal contributions were his development of practical techniques for the evaluation of the performance of information retrieval systems and numerous useful and heavily cited writings, e.g., his The Measurement and Evaluation of Library Services (1977; 2nd ed. 1991).
Lancaster edited the journal Library Trends from 1986 to 2006.
Publications
Shreeves, Sarah. "Curriculum Vitae for F. Wilfrid Lancaster." Library Trends 56, no 4 (Spring 2008): 975-993 provides a detailed bibliography on pp 977-992. [1] The Wikipedia provides a good list of Lancaster's principal publications. [2]
- "MEDLARS: Report on the evaluation of its operating efficiency." American documentation 20, no. 2 (1969): 119-142.
- Information retrieval on-line. With Emily Gallup. Los Angeles: Melville Pub. Co. 1973.
- The measurement and evaluation of library services. Arlington, Va.: Information Resources Press, 1977. 2nd ed., 1991.
- Information retrieval systems : characteristics, testing, and evaluation. New York: Wiley, 1968. Revised as Information retrieval today. With Amy J. Warner. Arlington, VA: Information Resources Press, 1993.
- "The Evolution of Electronic Publishing." Library Trends 43, no. 4 (1995): 518-27. [3]
- Indexing and abstracting in theory and practice. London: Library Association. 1st ed., 1991; 2nd ed., 1998; 3rd. ed. 2003. [4]
Awards
- American Society of Information Science. Outstanding teacher award, 1980; Award of Merit, 1988.