Mary Herner

Mary Herner

Mary Herner (1937-1997) was a British American pioneer of information science.

Mary Herner was born in Scotland in 1937 and came to the US in 1953. She was a physics honors graduate and was proficient in French, German, Spanish, Russian and Japanese and studied Latin and ancient Greek.

In 1958 with her husband Saul Herner she founded Herner and Company, a specialized business in the fields of information systems, clearinghouses and databases. Over the years she supervised the company's abstracting, indexing and database projects and became an authority on nuclear medicine.

She retired as president of Herner in 1996 and died in Fairfax, VA, in 1997.

Relevant Employment

• Technical assistant science attache, British Embassy, Washington, DC, 1953-58.
• Executive Vice-President, Herner & Company.

Publications

She was the author of 15 works published in technical journals.

• Herner, Mary, and Saul Herner. The current status of the government research report in the United States of America. Unesco International Advisory Committee on Bibliography, 1960.
• Herner, Saul, and Mary Herner. An Experiment in the Use of Reference Questions in the Design of a Classification System: Report to the National Science Foundation. Herner and Company, 1962.
• "Information needs and uses in science and technology." With S. Herner. Annual review of information science and technology 2, no. 1 (1967): 1-31.
• "The unpublished∗ government research report: 1959 and 1985." With S. Herner. Government Publications Review 13, no. 1 (1986): 97-104.

Offices

• Treasurer of ASIS in the late 60s and early 70s.

Source

Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science in 1997.