Template:Featured/Henriette Avram
Henriette Davidson Avram was born on October 7, 1919 in Manhattan, New York city. She majored in pre-medicine at Hunter College for two years during the 1930s. In 1952 she joined the National Security Agency as a systems analyst and an early computer programmer. She also took advanced mathematics classes at George Washington University. She later worked as a systems analyst and programmer at the American Research Bureau and then at Datatrol. At Datatrol, her attempt to organize the firm’s library brought her into contact with cataloging concepts. Becoming more and more interested in the idea of a bibliographic utility — a tool for sharing automated, cataloged information about books -— in 1965 she took a position as a systems analyst at the Library of Congress, where she led the development of the Machine Readable Cataloging (MARC) format for communicating library catalog data. She died on April 22, 2006 in Miami, Florida.