Irene Farkas-Conn

Irene Farkas-Conn (1928 - 2016) was a Hungarian American chemist and historian of documentation.

Irene Farkas-Conn, nee Sekeley, was born on September 26, 1928 in Hungary and died October 11, 2016 in Arlington, VA.

During World War II, she and members of her family used the Glass House, the Budapest headquarters of the family glass business, to cram more than 3,000 Jews into all available space, using chairs, desktops, stairs, closets, to shield them from the constant Nazi deportations to death camps. Meantime, the adjacent Swiss legation issued 7,500 protective passes (Schutzpasse) and as deportations accelerated, a second batch of 7,500 passes. But then the Swiss stopped issuing passes. With increasing pressure of deportations, volunteers and Jewish Glass House employees began working around the clock forging more protective passes. Many people used the passes to escape to Palestine, the future Israel, then a British mandate.

In 1947, she emigrated to New York, where she graduated Barnard College, got her master's degree in chemistry from Bryn Mawr College in Pennsylvania and later earned her Ph.D. in library science from the University of Chicago.

Her marriage to [?] Farkas ended in divorce. She later married Arthur Conn, and, afte hisi death, Ira Rosenthal.

In 1977, Farkas-Conn won the prestigious Watson Davis Award from the American Society for Information Science (ASIS) "for continuous dedicated service to the membership of ASIS." She served on numerous ASIS committees as well as on information-science-related committees of the American Institute of Chemical Engineers, (AIChE) where her husband, Arthur L. Conn, was a past president.

Publications

Farkas-Conn published about a hundred articles, notes and reviews mostly on information management. Also:

• From documentation to information science : the beginnings and early development of the American Documentation Institute-American Society for Information Science. New York : Greenwood Press, 1990. ISBN : 9780313255052. Based on her PhD dissertation at the University of Chicago, 1984. [1].
• "Irene Farkas-Conn oral history." (interview code: 3789), 09 Jul 1995 / conducted by USC Shoah Foundation.