Jesse Hauk Shera

American librarian and academic, 1903-1982

Life

Jesse Hauk Shera was born on December 8, 1903 in Oxford, Ohio. He received a B.A. in English literature from Miami(Ohio) University in 1925, and an M.A. in English from Yale in 1927. He entered the library profession immediately after his graduation from Yale, and in 1944 earned a Ph.D. from the Graduate Library School (GLS) of the University of Chicago.

In 1947, after a brief stint with the Central Information Division of the Office of Strategic Services, Shera joined the faculty of the GLS. By 1951, he was appointed dean of the School of Library Science (SLS) at Western Reserve University (WRU) in Ohio. Shera expanded and improved the SLS program, and forged a link between the school and the fields of documentation and special librarianship.

He was a charter member of the American Documentation Institute, and in 1953 became editor of the Institute's journal American Documentation, a position he held for seven years. In 1955 Shera established, with the help of James Perry and Allen Kent, the Center for Documentation and Communication Research (CDCR). The CDCR became a pioneer in the emerging field of information retrieval. As a result of Shera, Perry and Kent's work, the school not only received research grants, but was also the recipient of "the first operational system for the mechanized retrieval of information," the GE 225 general-purpose computer. These and other achievements, notably his prolific writing, brought Shera international recognition.

Despite his successes in the field of documentation, Shera eventually began to rethink his belief that information science could provide the "intellectual and theoretical foundations of librarianship." He believed librarians had to look beyond the "mechanized access to data banks or networks" to find the underpinnings of library theory.

Employment

• Central Information Division of OSS
• Faculty member at GLS
• WRU

Contributions

Shera wrote a column for Wilson Library Bulletin. At OSS, he experimented with techniques for indexing. He was Dean Emeritus, Baxter School of Information and Library Science, Western Reserve University. He was the leading authority on documentation, classification, and history of American libraries. He dedicated his career to enhancing the status of librarianship. Shera served in editorial capacity for Library Quarterly, American Documentation, and Journal of Cataloging and Classification. With Shera's help the library school at WRU became a center of advanced ideas and techniques in librarianship. While at the Center for Documentation and Communications Research at WRU, Shera, along with Perry, devoted their research to defining new information science and serving the needs of Cold War research. His Introduction to Library Science (1986) is still one of the world's most widely-used texts, and it has been translated into many languages including Russian.

Awards

• Melvil Dewey Medal (1968).American Library Association.
• Award of Merit Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T)<ref>Template:Cite web</ref> (1973).
• Joseph W. Lippincott Award.(1973). American Library Association.
• American Library Association Honorary Membership, 1976.
• Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science (1982).

Books by Jesse Shera

• Introduction to library science: basic elements of library service. Littleton, Colo.: Libraries Unlimited, 1976 Template:ISBN
• Knowing books and men; knowing computers too. Littleton, Colo., Libraries Unlimited, 1973 Template:ISBN
• The foundations of education for librarianship. New York, Becker and Hayes 1972 Template:ISBN
• "The complete librarian"; and other essays. Cleveland, Press of Western Reserve University, 1971, 1979 Template:ISBN
• Sociological foundations of librarianship. New York, Asia Pub. House 1970 Template:ISBN
• Documentation and the organization of knowledge. Hamden, Conn., Archon Books, 1966
• Libraries and the organization of knowledge. London, C. Lockwood 1965
• An epistemological foundation for library science. Cleveland, Press of Western Reserve University, 1965
• Information resources: a challenge to American science and industry. Cleveland, Press of Western Reserve Univ. 1958
• The classified catalog: basic principles and practices. Chicago, American Library Association, 1956
• Documentation in action / Jesse H. Shera, Allen Kent, James W. Perry [editors]. New York : Reinhold Publishing Corp., 1956.
• Historians, books and libraries: a survey of historical scholarship in relation to library resources, organization and services. Cleveland, Press of Western Reserve University, 1953
• Bibliographic organization. Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1951
• Foundations of the public library: the origins of the public library movement in New England, 1629–1855. Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 1952, 1949
• An eddy in the western flow of America culture. Ohio state archæological and historical quarterly. --Columbus, O., 1935.
• The age factor in employment, a classified bibliography, by J.H. Shera ... Bulletin of bibliography and dramatic index. --Boston : Boston Book Co., 1931-32.

Offices

• AALS Pres. 1964-65
• Ohio Library Association Pres. 1963-64

Further reading

• H. Curtis Wright. Jesse Shera, librarianship and information science. Provo, Utah : School of Library and Information Sciences, Brigham Young University (1988)
• John V. Richardson Jr., The Spirit of Inquiry: The Graduate Library School at Chicago, 1921-1951. Foreword by Jesse Shera. Chicago: American Library Association, 1982.
• John V. Richardson Jr., The Gospel of Scholarship: Pierce Butler and A Critique of American Librarianship. Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1992. xv, 350 pp.
• Shera, J. H., & Rawski, C. H. (1973). Toward a theory of librarianship: Papers in honor of Jesse Hauk Shera. Metuchen, N.J: Scarecrow Press.

Papers

Location #1: Case Western Reserve University Archives, Cleveland, OH.

• Papers dates: 1912-1971
• Size: ca. 29 feet
• Includes: Personal papers including correspondence, speeches, reports, conference papers, and publications relating to ALA conferences, Carnegie Study, GLS, University of Chicago, Ohio Library Association, SLA, UNESCO conferences, and Documentation.
• Finding aid:
• Sources: NUCMC, MS 74-73, p. 139 and article about Shera in DALB Supplement, p. 123.