Pauline Cochrane

Professor Cochrane began her library science career with an M.A. from Rosary College (now Dominican University) in 1954. Her 50+ year career spans work at the Chicago Public Library and Chicago Teachers College, World Book Encyclopedia, American Institute of Physics, and Syracuse University. She has consulted and lectured throughout the world (especially at the United Nations and agencies in Washington D.C.); conducted research projects to improve catalogs and indexes; created an online UDC-based retrieval system, the first campus-based retrieval system for Psychological Abstracts; strove to improve the ERIC Thesaurus; and as part of the Digital Library Initiative, helped to design 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 an Oryx Press 1985 book, Redesign of Catalogs and Indexes for Improved Online Subject Access; Selected Papers.