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

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 Foundationʹs 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.