Library Pioneer Henriette Avram Dies

I didn't know Ms. Avram wasn't a librarian by training. From Wednesday's New York Times:

Henriette D. Avram, Modernizer of Libraries, Dies at 86

By MARGALIT FOX
Published: May 3, 2006
Henriette D. Avram, a systems analyst who four decades ago transformed millions of dog-eared catalog cards in the Library of Congress into a searchable electronic database, and in the process helped transform the gentle art of librarianship into the sleek new field of information science, died on April 22 in Miami. She was 86 and had lived for many years in California, Md.

The cause was cancer, her family said.

Mrs. Avram, who was not a librarian by training, is widely credited with developing the automated cataloging system that rendered printed cards obsolete. Known to librarians as Marc, for Machine Readable Cataloging, Mrs. Avram's system is, in its current form, the worldwide standard.

Her work changed forever the relationship of a library to its users, making it possible, with the push of a button, to search the holdings of a library thousands of miles away. It also made it possible to "visit" the library at midnight attired in nothing more than a bathrobe, a practice brick-and-mortar libraries traditionally discouraged.

When Mrs. Avram joined the Library of Congress in the mid-1960's, the American card catalog had scarcely changed in half a century. Each item in a library's collection was represented by typewritten cards of thick, cream-colored paper. Many of the cards were annotated by hand, in what, impossibly, seemed to be the same handwriting in widely separated libraries. (In fact, the characteristic script — squarish and slanting slightly backward — was taught in library schools.)

"She developed the mechanism for being able to capture the data that the user was seeing on the 3-by-5 catalog card into an electronic format," Beacher Wiggins, the director of acquisitions and bibliographic access at the Library of Congress, said in a telephone interview yesterday. "And what that did was open the door for data to be shared broadly."

Mrs. Avram's work in encoding and organizing data for transmission across long distances also helped set the stage for the development of the Internet, Mr. Wiggins said.

Henriette Regina Davidson was born in Manhattan on Oct. 7, 1919. She began premedical studies at Hunter College, and in 1941 married Herbert Mois Avram (pronounced AH-vrum).

In the early 1950's, after her husband took a job with the National Security Agency, Mrs. Avram moved to the Washington area, where she studied mathematics at George Washington University.

Mrs. Avram's husband died in January. She is survived by their children, Marcie, of Manhattan; Lloyd, of Key West, Fla.; and Jay, of Arlington, Va.

In 1952, Mrs. Avram also went to work for the N.S.A., where she learned computer programming; she later worked for Datatrol, an early software company. In 1965, she joined the Library of Congress, where she was put in charge of the Marc pilot project.

It was not a job for the faint-hearted. The catalog comprised millions of items — books, maps, films, sound recordings and more — in hundreds of languages, many using non-Roman alphabets. The cards for each item contained many discrete pieces of information (including author, title, publisher and place of publication), each of which would need to be represented with a separate mathematical algorithm.

To translate the cards into something a computer could digest, understand and share, Mrs. Avram also had to enter the mind of the library cataloger, a profession whose arcane knowledge — involving deep philosophical questions about taxonomy, interconnectedness and the nature of similarity and difference — was guarded like priestly ritual.

"A big challenge would be just understanding what goes on in this world of cataloging because it's a really complicated world," Allyson Carlyle, an associate professor at the Information School at the University of Washington, said in an interview. "It's something that's passed from generation to generation; there's still a lot of unwritten practice."

The pilot project was finished in 1968, and, starting the next year, bibliographic records were dispatched on magnetic tape to libraries around the country. In 1971, Marc became the national standard for electronic cataloging; it was named the international standard two years later. Mrs. Avram retired from the Library of Congress in 1992 as associate librarian for collections services.

Today, a mouse click brings up the Library of Congress Online Catalog (catalog.loc.gov), the modern incarnation of the work Mrs. Avram began in 1965.

It also brings up eBay, where a copy of the American Library Association's book "Rules for Filing Catalog Cards" (2nd ed., 1968; 104 pp.; softcover; 6 x 9 inches), can be had for 99 cents.