Professor Emerita Pauline Anna Blazina Atherton Cochrane passed away on July 29, 2024, at The Arthur Home, in Arthur, Illinois. She is survived by her daughter Linda-Rose Myers, her granddaughter Zara Rose Browne, and her grandson George Chamoun.
Born in Argo, Illinois, Cochrane was the daughter of John V. Blazina and Anna Jacovich. She graduated with Phi Beta Kappa honors from Illinois College in Jacksonville, Illinois, in 1951. She began her library science career with an MA from Rosary College, now Dominican University, in 1954. Her academic appointments included Chicago Teachers College (now Chicago State University), Syracuse University, and University of Illinois.
A professor of library and information science, Cochrane was a pioneer in the area of subject access in information organization. The writings of S. R. Ranganathan (The Five Laws of Library Science) and a conference in India deeply influenced both her publications and her teaching. Her academic papers are housed at Syracuse University.
Cochrane consulted and lectured around the world, notably at the United Nations and agencies in Washington D.C. She conducted research projects to improve catalogs and indexes; created an online UDC (Universal Decimal Classification)-based retrieval system, which was the first campus-based retrieval system for Psychological Abstracts; strove to improve the ERIC (Education Resources Information Center) Thesaurus; and as part of the Digital Library Initiative, assisted in designing a hypertextual thesaurus browser. As an educator, she helped to introduce computer-based cataloging and online reference courses in the 1960s and early 1970s. The first twenty-five years of her career are documented in a 1985 Oryx Press book, Redesign of Catalogs and Indexes for Improved Online Subject Access; Selected Papers. In 2010, her contributions were documented by Associate Professor Emerita Kathryn La Barre in the article, “Pauline Atherton Cochrane: Weaving Value from the Past,” which appeared in Libraries & the Cultural Record (Volume 45, Number 2).
Cochrane temporarily left academia while married to anthropologist Glynn Cochrane, during which time she consulted for the Library of Congress and conducted research while living in Papua New Guinea and Sri Lanka. Returning to the United States in 1987, she accepted a position as visiting research professor at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, where she focused on classification and computer-based library catalogs. In addition to her research and teaching, Cochrane significantly influenced the field of LIS through her many consultancies, visiting professorships, funded research, and publications. She served as president of the American Society for Information Science (ASIS) in 1971, and she was recognized with the ASIS Outstanding Information Science Teacher Award in 1981 and the ASIS Award of Merit in 1990.
Until her retirement in 2008, one of Cochrane’s greatest joys was teaching and encouraging early career researchers. Bringing her equal joy were music and observing the natural world, the latter of which she shared in her informal journals and haiku poetry. She also supported the Smithsonian Chamber Music Society and the Oberlin Credo program to help develop younger musicians.