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Article Excerpt
ABSTRACT
Research during the 1950s in library and information science reflected the intense intellectual foment and fervor of the time. As a master's student of library science at Western Reserve University (WRU) in 1952, Phyllis Allen Richmond found herself at the epicenter of some of the most exciting work being pursued in the field. Her academic career crosscuts diverse areas. She was a champion of library automation, of facet analytical theory, and of the history of science. She always kept the future of classification firmly at the center of her work. This retrospective of the pioneering accomplishments and contributions of a distinguished forty-year career will draw upon recollections, materials at the Case Western Reserve University Archive, and Richmond's own writings.
OVERVIEW
The most beautiful experience we can have is the mysterious. It is the fundamental emotion which stands at the cradle of true art and true science. (Einstein, 1954, p. 11)
Phyllis Richmond was both a scholar and a tireless organizer. (Refer to appendices 1 and 2 for a bibliography and excerpts from her informal essays.) She was also the first female recipient of the Award of Merit from the American Society for Information Science (ASIS, now ASIS&T). In the first twenty-five years of the award only two other women, Claire Schultz (1980) and Pauline Atherton Cochrane (1990), were so honored. In presenting Richmond with the award of merit, ASIS commended her "contribution to the understanding of the theory and practice of subject analysis, in general, and classification, in particular" (Phyllis Richmond: Award, 1972, p. 3).
With classification her cynosure and history of science her ground, Richmond's sense of wonder and imagination remained fully intact throughout her distinguished career. Whether writing about the history of science, classification, cataloging, information retrieval, or in the context of one of her many book or conference reviews, Richmond always reminded her readers that their discipline is grounded by and primarily concerned with the interrelationships among people, documents, and technology. Like Janus, god of the past and the future--of beginnings and endings--her work is at once retrospective and predictive. As such, Richmond can provide guidance to those charged with assessing the strengths, failures, and future of our systems of knowledge organization and of the field itself.
This article outlines Richmond's contributions to our field and seeks to establish the continuing importance of her work. There are many ways to take the measure of a person, and it is always useful to gain some biographical context, which is where this story will begin. Next I will look to the broader context of developments in the field before assessing the impact of her work then and now. The remnants of Richmond's personal and professional papers are held at the Case Western Reserve University Archive. These archival papers, Richmond's own writings, and oral history interviews with Pauline Atherton Cochrane (Cochrane, 2001/2002) serve as the foundation of this inquiry.
HISTORY OF SCIENCE
The universe in which we live is apparently open and genuinely infinite, both infinitely big and infinitely small. Data, laws, methods, theories in all fields are partially and imperfectly known. On one hand, the possibility of discovery seems unending. On the other hand the use of creative imagination appears limitless. (Richmond, 1963e, p. 396)
Phyllis Allen Richmond was born in Boston in 1921, but she spent her early years in Rochester, New York. She decided to attend Mather College at Western Reserve University (WRU) after learning that a relative, Elijah Porter Barrows, had been a professor at the school during its early days when it was located not in Cleveland, as today, but in Hudson, Ohio (Richardson, 1983; CWRU, n.d.). Upon her enrollment at WRU, Richmond undertook a course of study in undergraduate history just as the Mather Alumnae Historical Association donated a large sum of money to support a number of lectures and seminars in the history department. First in the series was a week-long seminar on the history of science in seventeenth-century England given by Dean Marjorie Nicholson of Smith College, and Dorothy Stimson, dean and professor of history at Goucher College. Richmond enrolled in this seminar and wrote an essay, entitled "Problems Connected with the Development of the Telescope, 1609-1687," that received the Alumnae Association prize and was published in Isis (Allen, 1942/1943). It was an auspicious beginning to Richmond's academic career in the history of science (Siney, 1998). Both her undergraduate degree (1943) and master's degree (1946) were awarded with honors from Western Reserve University. In recognition of her outstanding scholarship and in support of her doctoral study at the University of Pennsylvania, Richmond was offered an American Council of Learned Societies fellowship at Cornell (1947) and a Bennett fellowship (1948) at the University of Pennsylvania. She made remarkable progress in her studies and graduated in 1949 with a Ph.D. in history and philosophy of science.
Her dissertation, Americans and the Germ Theory of Disease (1949), has received appreciative attention recently as scholars revisit the reasons why the American medical establishment clung so tightly to the miasma theories of disease long after they had been rejected on the Continent (Tomes, 1997). Richmond occasionally explored this theme in articles throughout her career, and she frequently drew on history of science themes when writing for other disciplines. Richmond never taught in this subject area as academic positions, once so plentiful, had become scarce by 1949. Instead, after graduation she served as curator of history at the Rochester Museum of Arts and Sciences and briefly as research assistant to the director of Johns Hopkins' Institute for the History of Medicine (Richardson, 1983, p. 1).
LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SCIENCE
If a discipline is defined by the nature of its problems, then library science must be the discipline to end all disciplines. We have more problems per square head than almost any other field. (Richmond, 1977, p. 115)
In 1952 Richmond left her research position at Johns Hopkins and returned to Western Reserve University in Cleveland, Ohio, to attend library school (Williamson, 1999, p. 186). These were heady times at WRU (which became Case Western Reserve University [CWRU] in 1967). Jesse Shera was just settling in for his first year as dean. In 1955 the heavily funded Center for Documentation and Communications Research (CDCR), founded by Shera, James W. Perry, and Allen Kent, was established at WRU. With a mission to provide "[a] continuing program of research directed to the discovery and development of new or improved methods and procedures for organizing, disseminating and utilizing recorded information to meet the ever-increasing demands from science, industry and allied fields," (1) the center injected courses in documentation and information retrieval into the WRU curriculum. (2) With a new home in the Freiburger Library (Hanson, 2001) and Shera as the editor of American Documentation, the School of Library Science proved to be a place of unsurpassed opportunity for Richmond. During her time at WRU, Richmond cultivated a deep appreciation for classification, and Jesse Shera proved an able mentor. She declined, however, to enroll in the new Ph.D. program that was established in 1956 stating, "Enough, Four degrees are enough." (Richardson, 1983, p. 2).
EARLY AUTOMATION EFFORT
[M]ay I suggest that we borrow the motto of the Royal Society of London: Nullius in verba--nothing in words. (Or interpreting seventeenth century parlance into twentieth century idiom. Don't tell me how systems function--show me.) (Richmond, 1977, p. 115)
After her graduation in 1956, Richmond found employment at the River Campus of the University of Rochester. She remained at the University of Rochester for the next fourteen years and corresponded frequently with Shera during this period. Richmond held a series of positions at Rochester, first as a serials cataloger at the Science Libraries from 1955 to 1960, then as supervisor of the same libraries from 1961 to 1966. These were the years in which the library world was on the verge of automation. The Council for Library Resources was established with Vernor Clapp at the helm in 1956, the year of Richmond's graduation. Its heady mandate was to put emerging technologies to use in libraries. A major project supported by the council began in 1965 with the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT) Intrex (INformation Transfer and Retrieval Experiments) conference, with its objective of fostering interdisciplinary communication between engineers, scientists, and information workers. The conference led off what were to be for the council several very frustrating years of funding without effect, as ultimately Project Intrex achieved almost nothing (Burke, 1996, 2002). It was not until 1966 that MARC (MAchine Readable Cataloging) was standardized by Henriette Avram's team at the Library of Congress and not until 1972 that "the true networking" began with online delivery of MARC via Ohio College Library Center (OCLC) (Richmond, 1981c, p. 24).
Today, opinion remains divided as to the reception given to the introduction of computers and automation initiatives by American library staff. Were librarians irrationally afraid of science and technology or Luddites in disguise? Did those who heralded technological solutions put the machine first and fail to adequately comprehend the complexities of the library (Rayward, 2002)? How best to solve the "information problem?" Many who considered themselves part of the American documentalist movement were openly critical of the lack of response and enthusiasm given by library staff to early information systems (Williams, 1997). Shera captures the situation with his usual wit in his Automation without Fear: "[I]t is now the 'little black box'; which is the bete noir of the library profession--the diabolus ex machina that is the recipient of professional scorn, the Pandora's chest from whence all evil swarms. One can opine that future generations, having learned to live happily with automation, will search out other scapegoats to censure" (1966, p. 84).
Richmond's work at Rochester during these early years of exploration in library automation served as excellent preparation for her next post. In 1966 the University of Rochester created the position of information systems specialist expressly for her. This gave her the role of overseer during the automation of the University of Rochester libraries. Shera's experiences with the technologies then in use at the CDCR and his eventual and bitter disappointment with the research direction at the CDCR taken by Kent and Perry alerted Richmond to the potential of rough water ahead. In a letter to Alan Rees (a faculty member at WRU and head of reference at the CDCR), Shera sums up his experience of the CDCR and the Comparative Systems Laboratory (CSL) established at the CDCR in 1958:
The rest of the story you have pretty much lived through yourself. But I should add here that for the years when Perry and Kent were around the Center never really did what I wanted it to do ... Perry was sold on his own system, telegraphic abstracts, semantic codes, role indicators, and the like, and I never could get him onto the track I wanted. Nevertheless ... Perry made a very important contribution in those early days, by showing the complexities of the field, the importance of linguistics, etc. etc., so I have no real regret about the move I made in setting up the Center. But it really was not until you...
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