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Article Excerpt
ABSTRACT
Foster Edward Mohrhardt was a librarian in federal libraries for much of his career and served as the director of the National Agricultural Library from 1954 to 1968. Throughout his long library career, he used the freedom of his directorship to participate in a variety of high-level projects across organizations. This role served both to advance the prestige of the National Agricultural Library and to promote his personal goal to develop national and international library networks to support scientific communication. He worked actively throughout his career to bring librarians and documentalists together to address information problems outlined by practicing scientists and policymakers at a time when there was contention and competition between librarianship and documentation, which was then emerging as a new discipline. Mohrhardt considered librarianship an international endeavor, requiring cooperation and creativity to increase access to information produced in other countries. He saw libraries as essential to the growth of science and successful service necessarily fled to the development of national and international information systems. He mobilized people and resources to develop agricultural and research libraries and expand librarianship throughout the world. In light of current trends in scientific communication, and reemerging tensions concerning the role of libraries in information systems development, Mohrhardt's work is a significant model for increasing the prevalence of library expertise in current scientific data management activities. As a diplomat who bridged librarianship and documentation, his career as a librarian and an organizational leader deserves renewed attention.
INTRODUCTION
The present state of information management in the biological sciences (biodiversity, genetics, and neuroscience) reveals growing dependence on international cooperation. Professionals in the field anticipate that infrastructure development and data sharing will become the cornerstones of discovery (Revolutionizing Science, 2003; National Institutes of Health, 2003). Technological advances will support integration and aggregation of highly complex data produced across multiple fields using various methods (Final Report of the OECD, 1999). In a comparable way, technological advances during the 1950s and 1960s accelerated scientific productivity and discovery, illuminating a variety of information organization and access problems. There are other parallels worth noting between the scientific communication problems experienced during the 1950s and 1960s and those in the current scientific information environment. Perhaps the most visible of these is the prevalence of scientists directly involved in the development of technological solutions to information problems, particularly in the nascent "e-science" domain, which consists of large-scale, distributed scientific research that produces digital data.
In broad strokes, the conditions for information management in the late 1950s and 1960s resulted, in part, from the information flood produced following World War II, when many thousands of documents and technical reports were imported from other countries and many thousands more from our own scientific activities released from classified status. The outcome of the war led to a belief that access to scientific information would lead to increased wealth and security for the country. In addition, the Russian Sputnik launch in 1957 instigated a coordinated federal response to compete for scientific superiority, a part of which resulted in new funding for technology and for the development of coordinated scientific information systems. These events helped to stimulate the emerging discipline of documentation, the growth of which was tied to developing mechanical and computing approaches to the management of report and technical literature (Williams, 1997). In addition to an added focus on dissemination, documentation techniques were in conflict with traditional bibliographic techniques, which were not intended to represent and integrate into collections materials in new formats (such as technical reports) at the rate they were being produced. The American documentation movement sought to experiment with mechanization and automated methods to solve these problems. It sought to add highly granular indexing and abstracting to document processing and to introduce special dissemination services for the new stores of scientific and technical information that were being developed. Today we recognize those kinds of research problems and activities that were then seen as belonging to an emergent discipline called documentation as part of the domain of information science.
Many people were involved in the expanding information sector in the postwar period. Both individuals and organizations contributed to policy planning and systems and service implantation. Among the individuals who had distinct opportunities to facilitate interdisciplinary activity targeted at scientific communication was Foster Edward Mohrhardt, the director of the National Agricultural Library (NAL) from 1954 to 1968. Mohrhardt's personal and organizational work focused on the information problems experienced by scientists and researchers in the decades following the Second World War. He saw his primary mission as the creation and implementation of large-scale information networks to support the flow of scientific information. In addition to participating in national scientific and information systems planning, Mohrhardt worked actively throughout his career to bring librarians and documentalists together to address information problems outlined by practicing scientists and policymakers. At a time when there was contention and competition between the librarianship and documentation fields (Williams, 1997), Mohrhardt was, as Clapp (1966) notes, a pioneer in his promotion of collaboration between them. Foster Mohrhardt opened new paths for librarians by securing a role for them in various scientific information activities. He was active in professional and governmental organizations and many of his accomplishments occurred in such contexts. He mobilized people and resources to promote libraries and expand librarianship throughout the world. He was an innovator, willing to implement new approaches, to cultivate cooperative activities, and to change organizations that were entrenched in old ways. Often Mohrhardt represented libraries at planning activities that rarely included other librarians. This is evidenced by a series of engagements in high-level organizational work, which show his deep dedication to, and conviction of, the important role of libraries and librarianship in scientific communication.
Mohrhardt wrote on several subjects, including library management and science and technical reference, but what stands out are his publications concerning the validity of documentation as a discipline and his papers on science and agricultural information systems. Over the course of two decades, he spoke regularly of the historical foundations of librarianship, but he shaped his rhetoric about documentation to validate it as a separate and necessary discipline that could complement librarianship. His works on librarianship and documentation, national information
systems planning, and scientific information problems collectively embody a genre of scientific writing identified by Ceccarelli (2001) as "interdisciplinary inspirational." Applying Ceccarelli's framework to this body of work, I will detail Mohrhardt's progressive case for cooperative interaction among librarians, documentalists, and scientists. These writings--along with Mohrhardt's organizational work--were meant to motivate and inspire interdisciplinary activity. Through Mohrhardt's role as a diplomat (Vosper, 1993), (1) he connected a range of people interested in librarianship and documentation while promoting national information systems to support scientific endeavor. Through these actions, he was influential in ways that are important to reassess today in view of the information problems emerging in the digitization of science and the current debates about the future role of libraries.
Foster Mohrhardt was a librarian who held interesting jobs and many high-ranking positions in national and international professional organizations. These include serving as
* President of the International Association of Agricultural Librarians and Documentalists (IAALD), 1955-69
* President of the National Book Exchange, 1958-60
* U.S. Board of Civil Service Examiners, appointed 1958
* Vice-President of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, 1963
* Founder and Chair of Section T (Information Science)
* President of the National Federation of Scientific Abstracting and Indexing Services, 1964-65
* Chair of the U.S. National Committee of the International Federation of Documentation (FID), 1965
* Vice-President of the International Federation of Library Associations, 1965-71
* President of the Association of Research Libraries, 1966
* President of the Council on Biological Sciences Information, National Academy of Sciences, 1966-67
* President of the American Library Association, 1967-68
These positions afforded him access to people and resources that he mobilized to support library development and cooperative librarianship. While his library directorships were visible public positions, his organizational activities were more "behind the scenes." This...
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