Portal:Library and information science/Selected biography

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Selected biographies archive

E. J. Josey is an American activist, librarian and Professor Emeritus, Department of Library and Information Science, School of Library and Information Sciences, University of Pittsburgh.

During the early 1960s, he participated in the Civil Rights struggle in Savannah. He served on the Executive Board of the Savannah Branch of the NAACP as well as the Executive Board of the Albany, NY Branch of the NAACP. In 1964 he carried the Civil Rights struggle into the American Library Association. In spite of the 1954 United States Supreme Court decision, which encouraged desegregation of libraries and ALA chapters, the ALA was slow in implementing integration of all of its southern chapters until Josey offered his resolution at the 1964 Conference which prevented ALA officers and staff members from attending segregated state chapter meetings. The four remaining segregated chapters that denied membership to African American librarians at that time were Alabama, Georgia, Louisiana, and Mississippi; and they integrated immediately. He is well known for his uncompromising opposition to any form of discrimination whether it is racial, gender, age or sexual orientation.

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Mayme Agnew Clayton (August 4, 1923 – October 13, 2006) was a librarian, and the Founder, President & Spiritual Leader of the Western States Black Research and Education Center (WSBREC), the largest privately held collection of African-American historical materials in the world. The collection represents the core holdings of the Mayme A. Clayton Library Museum and Cultural Center (MCL) located in Culver City, California.

Over the course of 45 years, Clayton single-handedly and with her own resources, collected more than 30,000 rare and out-of-print books. The collection is considered one of the most important for African-American materials. Her collecting grew from her work as a librarian, first at the University of Southern California and later at the University of California, Los Angeles, where she began to build an African-American collection. Clayton, an avid golfer, traveled for her sport, trolling for rare finds wherever she went. The centerpiece of the collection that grew this way is a signed copy of Phillis Wheatley’s Poems on Various Subjects, Religious and Moral, from 1773. First published by an American of African descent, the book was acquired for $600 from a New York dealer in 1973. In 2002 it was appraised at $30,000.

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Thomas Jefferson (13 April 1743 N.S.–4 July 1826) was the third President of the United States (1801–09), the principal author of the Declaration of Independence (1776), and one of the most influential Founding Fathers for his promotion of the ideals of Republicanism in the United States. Major events during his presidency include the Louisiana Purchase (1803) and the Lewis and Clark Expedition (1804–1806). After the British burned Washington, D.C. and the Library of Congress in August 1814, Jefferson offered his own collection to the nation. In January 1815, Congress accepted his offer, appropriating $23,950 for his 6,487 books, and the foundation was laid for a great national library. Today, the Library of Congress' website for federal legislative information is named THOMAS, in honor of Jefferson.

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Sir Thomas Bodley (March 2, 1545 – January 28, 1613), was an English diplomat and scholar, founder of the Bodleian Library, Oxford. He determined, he said, "to take his farewell of state employments and to set up his staff at the library door in Oxford." In 1598 his offer to restore the old library was accepted by the university. Bodley not only used his private fortune in this undertaking, but induced many of his friends to make valuable gifts of books. In 1611 he began its permanent endowment, and at his death, the greater part of his fortune was left to it.

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Benjamin Franklin (January 17 [O.S. January 6] 1706 – April 17, 1790) was one of the best-known Founding Fathers of the United States. He was a leading author, politician, printer, scientist, philosopher, publisher, inventor, civic activist, and diplomat. He founded the United States' earliest libraries, including The Library Company of Philadelphia and those found at the University of Pennsylvania, Harvard University, Brown University, Dartmouth College, and many others. As a scientist he was a major figure in the history of physics for his discoveries and theories regarding electricity. As a political writer and activist he, more than anyone, invented the idea of an American nation, and as a diplomat during the American Revolution, he secured the French alliance that helped to make independence possible.

Franklin was noted for his curiosity, his writings (popular, political and scientific), and his diversity of interests. As a leader of the Enlightenment, he gained the recognition of scientists and intellectuals across Europe. An agent in London before the Revolution, and Minister to France during it, he more than anyone defined the new nation in the minds of Europe. His success in securing French military and financial aid was a great contributor to the American victory over Britain. He invented the lightning rod; he was an early proponent of colonial unity; historians hail him as the "First American."

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George Boole [buːl], (November 2, 1815 – December 8, 1864) was a British mathematician and philosopher. As the inventor of Boolean algebra, the basis of all modern computer arithmetic, Boole is regarded in hindsight as one of the founders of the field of computer science, although computers did not exist in his day. Boolean algebra was also used in the development of information retrieval, a major subfield of information science.

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Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz (also Leibnitz or von Leibniz (July 1 (June 21 Old Style) 1646 – November 14, 1716) was a German polymath who wrote mostly in Latin and French.

Educated in law and philosophy, and serving as factotum to two major German noble houses (one becoming the British royal family while he served it), Leibniz played a major role in the European politics and diplomacy of his day. He occupies an equally large place in both the history of philosophy and the history of mathematics. He invented calculus independently of Newton, and his notation is the one in general use since. He also invented the binary system, foundation of virtually all modern computer architectures. In philosophy, he is most remembered for optimism, i.e., his conclusion that our universe is, in a restricted sense, the best possible one God could have made. He was, along with René Descartes and Baruch Spinoza, one of the three great 17th century rationalists, but his philosophy also both looks back to the Scholastic tradition and anticipates modern logic and analysis.

Leibniz also made major contributions to physics and technology, and anticipated notions that surfaced much later in biology, medicine, geology, probability theory, psychology, and information science. He also wrote on politics, law, ethics, theology, history, and philology, even occasional verse. His contributions to this vast array of subjects are scattered in journals and in tens of thousands of letters and unpublished manuscripts. To date, there is no complete edition of Leibniz's writings, and a complete account of his accomplishments is not yet possible.

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Seymour Lubetzky

Seymour Lubetzky (April 28, 1898-April 5, 2003) was a major cataloging theorist and a prominent librarian. Born in Belarus as Shmaryahu Lubetzky, he worked for years at the Library of Congress. He worked as a teacher before he immigrated to the United States in 1927. He earned his BA from UCLA in 1931, and his MA from UC Berkeley in 1932. Lubetzky also taught at the UCLA Graduate School of Education and Information Studies, then the School of Library Service.

Fluent in six languages, Lubetzky published three groundbreaking books that greatly advanced the discipline of cataloging, the organization of knowledge, and modern research methods, still influential in areas of information technology. Cataloging Rules and Principles and Principles of Cataloging, as well as several periodical articles, solidified Lubetzky as one of the most significant influences in his field.

His unfinished book, Code of Cataloging Rules... unfinished draft (1960), was the basis for modern cataloging adopted by the first International Conference on Cataloging Principles (1961) held in Paris, France, called the "Paris Principles." The code which eventually emerged from the conference was a landmark in the history of universal bibliographic control. In 1967 it developed into the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules, which subsequently has been revised over the years.

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Paul Otlet (b. August 23, 1868, Belgium - December 10, 1944) was the founding father of documentation, the field of study now more commonly referred to as information science. He created the Universal Decimal Classification, one of the most prominent examples of faceted classification. Otlet was responsible for the widespread adoption in Europe of the standard American 3x5 inch index card used until recently in most library catalogs around the world, though largely displaced by the advent of online public access catalogs (OPAC). Otlet wrote numerous essays on how to collect and organize the world’s knowledge, culminating in two books, the Traité de documentation (1934) and Monde: Essai d'universalisme (1935). Otlet, along with his friend and colleague Henri La Fontaine, who won the Nobel Prize in 1913, founded the now-bankrupt Institut International de Bibliographie in 1895 which later became in English the International Federation for Information and Documentation (FID). In 1910, following a huge international conference, they created the Union of International Associations, which is still located in Brussels. They also created a great international center called at first Palais Mondial (World Palace), later, the Mundaneum to house the collections and activities of their various organizations and institutes.

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Vannevar Bush (March 11, 1890 – June 30, 1974) was an American engineer and science administrator, known for his work on analog computing, his political role in the development of the atomic bomb, and the idea of the memex—seen as a pioneering concept for the World Wide Web. A leading figure in the development of the military-industrial complex and the military funding of science in the United States, Bush was a prominent policymaker and public intellectual ("the patron saint of American science") during World War II and the ensuing Cold War. Through his public career, Bush was a proponent of democratic technocracy and of the centrality of technological innovation and entrepreneurship for both economic and geopolitical security.

In the 1930s, he introduced the concept of the memex, a microfilm-based "device in which an individual stores all his books, records, and communications, and which is mechanized so that it may be consulted with exceeding speed and flexibility."

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Daniel Joseph Boorstin (October 1, 1914 – February 28, 2004) was a prolific American historian, professor, attorney, and writer. He served as the U.S. Librarian of Congress from 1975 until 1987.

Boorstin graduated with highest honors from Harvard, studied at Balliol College, Oxford as a Rhodes Scholar and earned his PhD. at Yale University. He was a lawyer and a university professor at the University of Chicago for 25 years. He also served as director of the National Museum of History and Technology of the Smithsonian Institution. Boorstin wrote more than 20 books, including a trilogy on the American experience and one on world intellectual history. The Americans: The Democratic Experience, the final book in the first trilogy, received the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for History. Boorstin also wrote the books The Discoverers, The Seekers and The Creators, a trilogy of books that attempt to survey the scientific, philosophic and artistic histories of humanity respectively.

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Sanford Berman (b. October 6, 1933) is an outspoken, radical librarian (cataloger) known for promoting alternative viewpoints in librarianship and acting as a pro-active information conduit to other librarians around the world, mostly via public speaking, voluminous correspondence, and unsolicited "care packages" delivered via the U.S. Postal Service. Will Manley, columnist for the American Library Association publication American Libraries, referred to Berman as a 'bibliographic warrior.'

The spark of Berman's cataloging revolution was the inclusion in Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) of the term kaffir, which he came across while working in Zambia : "Berman was told by offended black fellow-workers that calling someone a kafir was similar to being called a nigger in America."

This motivated him to systematically address subject heading bias in his work at Hennepin County Library and in writing "Prejudices and Antipathies: A Tract on the LC Subject Heads Concerning People."

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Jessamyn Charity West (born September 5, 1968) is a librarian and a former member of the American Library Association Council. Her father is Tom West. She is a self-described "anti-capitalist" who as of 2006 operates the blog librarian.net. She also operates the websites jessamyn.com and jessamyn.info and is a moderator on MetaFilter. In 2002 Library Journal identified her as a "mover and shaker."

Librarian.net's slogan is "putting the rarin' back in librarian since 1999." West characterizes librarian.net as generally "anti-censorship, pro-freedom of speech, pro-porn (for lack of a better way to explain that we don't find the naked body shameful), anti-globalization, anti-outsourcing, anti-Dr. Laura, pro-freak, pro-social responsibility and just generally pro-information and in favor of the profession getting a better image."

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Nancy Pearl (born January 12, 1945) is a librarian, best-selling author, book reviewer and was, until August 2004, the Executive Director of the Washington Center for the Book at Seattle Public Library. Her prolific reading and her knowledge of books and literature first made her locally famous in Seattle, Washington, where she regularly appears on public radio recommending books.

Pearl achieved broader fame with Book Lust: Recommended Reading for Every Mood, Moment and Reason, (2003) her guide to good reading, and the sequel More Book Lust (summer 2005) with the same subtitle, which received much acclaim ("a sprightly follow-up"), and was chosen by the Today Show as one of their book-club selections. As of 2006, she is working on a book of recommendations for children and teens to be called Book Crush.

Pearl's approach to enjoying reading is the Rule of 50 which states "If you still don't like a book after slogging through the first 50 pages, set it aside. If you're more than 50 years old, subtract your age from 100 and only grant it that many pages."

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Melvil Dewey (December 10, 1851–December 26, 1931) was the inventor of the Dewey Decimal Classification system for library classification.

In 1883 he became librarian of Columbia College, and in the following year founded the Columbia School of Library Economy, the first-ever institution organized for the instruction of librarians. This school, which was very successful, was removed to Albany, New York in 1890, where it was reestablished as the New York State Library School under his direction. From 1888 to 1906, he was director of the New York State Library and from 1888 to 1900 was secretary of the University of the State of New York, completely reorganizing the state library and making it one of the most efficient in America, as well as establishing the system of state traveling libraries and picture collections. In 1890 he helped to found the first state library association - the New York Library Association (NYLA) - and he was its first president, from 1890-1892.

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