A humble servant: The work of Helen L. Brownson and the early years of information science research

  • Authors:

  • Tina J. Jayroe

  • Affiliations:

  • School of Information Studies, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, P.O. Box 413, Milwaukee, WI53201

  • Venue:
  • Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
  • Year:
  • 2012

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Abstract

Helen Brownson was a federal government employee from 1942 to 1970. At a time when scientific data were becoming exceedingly hard to manage, Brownson was instrumental in coordinating national and international efforts for more efficient, cost-effective, and universal information exchange. Her most significant contributions to documentation/information science were during her years at the National Science Foundation's Office of Scientific Information. From 1951 to 1966, Brownson played a key role in identifying and subsequently distributing government funds toward projects that sought to resolve information-handling problems of the time: information access, preservation, storage, classification, and retrieval. She is credited for communicating the need for information systems and indexing mechanisms to have stricter criteria, standards, and evaluation methods; laying the foundation for present-day NSF-funded computational linguistics projects; and founding several pertinent documentation/information science publications including the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology. © 2012 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.