Henriette Avram, Maker of MARC

My “hey, I really am in the right field” moment of the week: Chugging through my Organization of Information readings for next class, I learned that MAchine Readable Cataloguing, otherwise known as MARC, the backbone of library catalogs everywhere, was engineered by Henriette Avram (1919–).

I can't begin to imagine the kind of guts it took to be a woman building major, profession-changing technology in the late 1960s. Somewhere there’s got to be a tell-all book about the development of MARC. Now I want to read it.

Ms. Avram received a lifetime membership in the American Library Association (scroll down for a photo) in 1997. A quick Google reveals that she was active as a speaker as recently as 2001. The American Society for Information Science includes her in its Pioneers pages.