Helen Louise Brownson

Helen Louise Brownson (1917-2017) was a federal government employee. Cleverdon called her "the major influence on documentation research" in the 1950's because of her oversight of dozens of projects.

Helen Brownson

Life

Brownson worked at: National Science Foundation (NSF) Office of Scientific Information; Central Intelligence Agency; Originally secretary and technical aide to A. N. Richards, Chairman of the Committee on Medical Research of the World War II Office of Scientific Research and Development (OSRD), headed by Vannevar Bush (1942-46).  Secretary of the Special Committee on Technical Information of the Research and Development Board, headed by Vannevar Bush, in the Department of Defense (1946-51); Assistant for Program Development and then Program Director for Scientific Information Research, Office of Scientific Information, National Science Foundation (1951-66); Projects Administrator in the field of Information Processing in the Research Department, Central Intelligence Agency (1966-70). Retired June 30, 1970.

Contributions

Preceded Burton Adkinson at NSF, set funding pattern of the Office Scientific Information. Began her career helping disseminate OSRD reports to science-technology users; Co-founder of the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST).

Further reading

• Tina J. Jayroe. "Homage to Helen Brownson: Information science pioneer." Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 10.1002/meet.14504901264, 49, 1, (4-1), (2013).
• Tina J. Jayroe. "A humble servant: The work of Helen L. Brownson and the early years of information science research." Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 10.1002/asi.22656, 63, 10, (2052-2061), (2012).