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Biographical Directory of Documentation and Information Science

About this project

This Biographical Directory of Documentation and Information Science is an international effort to document the lives and contributions of people and organizations who have made substantial contributions to the field.

This resource is designed to enable historical work in the field by identifying pioneering individuals and organizations significant to the development of Information Science, and providing locations of personal papers and archival records related to these individuals and organizations.

List of all pages.

It also includes a list of all pages, and a list of known oral histories of information scientists.

This directory is a publication of the Special Interest Group on the History and Foundations of Information Science of the Association for Information Science and Technology. The Editor is appointed by and reports to the Chair of the SIG. An Advisory Committee appointed by the Editor makes recommendations to the Editor and to the SIG Chair.

History

"Pioneers of Information Science" was initiated by Dr. Robert V. Williams, Distinguished Professor, Emeritus, School of Library and Information Science, University of South Carolina in 1996. The objectives of that project were to locate and document the archives and personal papers of individuals and organizations from the U.S. and Canada that were significant to the development of Information Science and Technology in the 20th century.

→ Read more about the original project

The initial Editor of the revived project was Jenny Bossaller (2024 - 2025), then Michael Buckland (2025 - present).

From today’s featured article

Henriette Avram

Henriette Davidson Avram was born on October 7, 1919 in Manhattan, New York city. She majored in pre-medicine at Hunter College for two years during the 1930s. In 1952 she joined the National Security Agency as a systems analyst and an early computer programmer. She also took advanced mathematics classes at George Washington University. She later worked as a systems analyst and programmer at the American Research Bureau and then at Datatrol. At Datatrol, her attempt to organize the firm’s library brought her into contact with cataloging concepts. Becoming more and more interested in the idea of a bibliographic utility — a tool for sharing automated, cataloged information about books -— in 1965 she took a position as a systems analyst at the Library of Congress, where she led the development of the Machine Readable Cataloging (MARC) format for communicating library catalog data. She died on April 22, 2006 in Miami, Florida.

→ Read the full page

Contributions and Editorial Policies

We invite contributions from all members of the information science community. We especially seek international contributions. If you would like to write an entry, please read about the scope of the project and create a short article (a stub) that includes the individual or organization that you wish to nominate and submit it to the editors at biographicaleditor at gmail dot com.

See also our Manual of Style [1] and Article Template page.

→ Read the full editorial policies