Pauline Atherton Cochrane

Pauline Atherton Cochrane (1929-2024) was an American librarian and author.

Pauline Cochrane

Life

Pauline Anna Blazina Atherton Cochrane was born in 1929. She earned a BA in social science in 1951 from Illinois College, Jacksonville, Illinois. Her first professional job was as an indexer at the Corn Products Refining Company. She went on to receive an MA in library science from Rosary College (now Dominican University), River Forest, Illinois. She worked as a reference librarian at the Chicago Public Library and Chicago Teacher's College (later Chicago State University), then doctoral study at the University of Chicago Graduate Library School.

In 1960 she was made Associate Director of the Documentation Research Project at the American Institute of Physics where she worked on A Project for the Development of a Reference Retrieval System for Physicists for the next four years. She differentiated how information retrieval would be performed by physicists as researchers versus physicists as authors using four facets which were in use at the American Institute of Physics until 2009. These facets were:

• property (being studied)
• object (of study)
• method (of inquiry)
• type of research (experimental, theoretical, or both).

Using bibliometrics, Cochrane was able to improve coverage of physics journals in Physics Abstracts using automated techniques.

Before she became professor at Syracuse, she was Associate Director of the Documentation Research Project at the American Institute of Physics.

She died on July 29, 2024 in Arthur, Illinois.

Contributions

Cochrane was a leading researcher in the campaign to redesign catalogues and indexes to provide improved online subject access and a respected teacher and theorist of cataloging, indexing, and information access."

While ASIS President, the organization began a continuing education program and prepared an international information science directory. Consultant to many organizations. As an UNESCO (UNISIST program) consultant, she prepared guidelines for organizing training courses, workshops, and seminars in technical information and documentation.

She edited the Handbook on Information Systems and Services for Developing Countries. She was appointed to the Committee on International Scientific and Technical Information Programs (CISTIP) of the National Academy of Sciences--National Research Council. Cochran's interests include computer-based reference services, indexing and abstracting, and education for library and information science.

Cochrane was a co-founder of the Classification Research Study Group in the late 1950s, a group devoted to "the intellectual/theoretical development of knowledge organization" based on Ranganathan's Library Research Circle in India and the Classification Research Group in England.

Consultant to many organizations. As an UNESCO (UNISIST program) consultant, she prepared guidelines for organizing training courses, workshops, and seminars in technical information and documentation.

She edited the Handbook on Information Systems and Services for Developing Countries. She continued in her work to help librarians learn how to use "newer" technology to help patrons find information and created a six part continuing education series for the American Library Association's magazine American Libraries. Entitled Modern Subject Access in the Online Age [1]

Publications

• A test of the factor-analytically derived automated classification method applied to descriptions of work and search requests of nuclear physicists : report (1965) by Pauline Atherton and Harold Borko
• Humanization of knowledge in the social sciences (1973) by Pauline A. Cochrane
• Putting knowledge to work an American view of Ranganathan's Five laws of library science (1973) by Pauline A Cochrane and S R Ranganathan.
• Interfaces in computer-based bibliographic searching. (1976) by Pauline A. Cochrane
• Handbook for information systems and services (1977) by Pauline Atherton
• Books are for use : final report of the subject access project to the Council on Library Resources. (1978) by Pauline Atherton
• "Modern subject access in the online age." American Libraries 15 (1984). [2]
• Librarians and online services (1978) by Pauline Atherton and Roger W. Christian
• Improving LCC and DDC for use in online catalogs and shelflists. (1989) by Pauline A. Cochrane
• Visualizing Subject Access for 21st Century Information Resources: Papers Presented at the Clinic on Library Applications of Data Processing. (1998) by Pauline A. Cochrane, Eric H. Johnson, and Sandra K. Roe, eds.

Offices

• American Society for Iinformation Science. President, 1971.
• National Academy of Sciences--National Research Council. Committee on International Scientific and Technical Information Programs (CISTIP).

Further reading

• Pauline Cochrane passes away. University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, School of Information Sciences. (Obituary).[3]
• "Pauline Atherton Cochrane," Wikipedia [4]]
• La Barre, Kathryn. "Pauline Atherton Cochrane: Weaving Value from the Past." Libraries & the Cultural Record 45, issue 2 (May 2010): 210–237. [5]
• La Barre, Kathryn. Weaving Webs of Significance: The Classification Research Study Group in the United States and Canada. In In W. Boyd Rayward & Mary Ellen Bowden (Eds). Proceedings of the 2002 conference on the History and Heritage of Scientific Information Systems, pp. 246-257. Medford, NJ: Information Today.

Papers

Syracuse University Library, Special Collections Department (Syracuse, NY). Pauline Atherton Cochrane Papers: personal/professional papers, 1966-1986; oral history interview of Cochrane. Finding aid [6]