Wikipedia

Claire Kelly Schultz

Claire Kelly Schultz (November 17, 1924 - May 28, 2015) was an American computer consultant and academic. She was a leading figure in the early development of automated information retrieval systems and information science.[1][2][3] A "documentalist",[4] she was particularly known for her work in thesaurus construction and machine-aided indexing,[5] innovating techniques for punch card information retrieval.

Claire Kelly Schultz
Born(1924-11-17)November 17, 1924
Etters, Pennsylvania, U.S.A.
DiedMay 28, 2015(2015-05-28) (aged 90)
Line Lexington, Pennsylvania, U.S.
Alma materJuniata College, Drexel Institute
SpouseWallace L. Schultz
AwardsASIS Award of merit, 1980
Scientific career
FieldsInformation science
InstitutionsMerck, Sharp and Dohme; Institute for Advancement of Medical Communications

While working as a librarian at the Merck, Sharp and Dohme[6] chemical company she "developed a machine-sorted card system that employed Boolean retrieval logic. Her first use of punched cards in 1949 used the Mooers Zator system."[7] This has been seen as a "transitional role of such punched-card systems toward later use of computers for information retrieval".[8][9][10]

Early life and education

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Claire Kelly was born on November 17, 1924, in Etters, Pennsylvania, to Joseph and Mary (Ross) Kelly. She went to a one-room school, completing 8th grade by age 12. At age 13, her family moved to a farm near Linglestown, Pennsylvania. Claire looked after the housework and livestock as well as attending school. At fifteen, she worked as governess and cook for another family, to earn money for college.[4]: 4 

At age 16, she completed high school and attended Juniata College, receiving a four-year scholarship for tuition, and working for a German family for room and board. She obtained her B.S. in chemistry and biology with a minor in mathematics, a pre-med major, in 1944, at age 19.[4]: 4–5 

Claire wanted to become a doctor, and applied at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, but was initially refused because of her age. She spent the next year working as an attendant at the Philadelphia State Hospital at Byberry as part of a Quaker program for the humane treatment of mental patients. At Byberry, she met her future husband, Wallace L. Schultz, a conscientious objector who also worked as an attendant. They married in June 1945.[4]: 7–8 

Claire was then accepted at the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania, which she attended from 1945-46. Soon after starting medical school she became pregnant with her first child. When the school became aware that she was married and pregnant, the dean was outraged and ordered her to leave.[4]: 9–10  After the baby was born, the couple returned to Philadelphia, where Wallace studied English Literature.[4]: 12–13  During much of their marriage, Claire was the primary breadwinner for the family, while Wallace took responsibility for parenting and running their home.[4]: 27 

Career

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IBM card punch, Claire Schultz collection, Science History Institute
 
IBM punch card, recto, Claire Schultz collection, Science History Institute
 
IBM punch card, verso, Claire Schultz collection, Science History Institute

During Schultz's career she worked as a computer consultant, a librarian, a researcher, and a professor.[11] From 1946 to 1948, Claire worked at the Wistar Institute of Anatomy and Biology. Initially hired as a librarian, she soon became a laboratory assistant to Dr. Edmond J. Farris, studying human reproduction and fertility.[4]: 12–13 

In 1948, she found a higher-paying job as a librarian at Sharp & Dohme in Glenolden, Pennsylvania (later Merck, Sharp & Dohme). While there, she was introduced to Calvin Mooers, an advocate of the Zator indexing system. Influenced by Mooers' ideas, Schultz compiled a "subject dictionary" to index the terminology used in scientific journals and by the Sharp and Dohme scientists. She and Robert Ford experimented with searching techniques and the use of the Remington Rand sorter and boolean logic. Then they convinced the company that the IBM 101 (which in 1950 was used only at the Census Bureau) could be adapted to do punch card searches with "and, or, and not" connectives, and arranged to rent one. They used the National Research Council's Chemical-Biological Coordination Center method of coding for chemical names.[4]: 12–17 

Claire Schultz also studied library science on weekends and evenings at Drexel University. With the support of Margaret Kehl, she was able to present her library sorting work as her thesis. She obtained her M.S. in library science in 1952. John Mauchly sought her out at a conference, and after visiting Merck for a demonstration of her use of the IBM, offered her a job whenever she wanted one.[4]: 20–21  She continued to work at Merck Research Laboratories until 1957.[4]: 13, 16 

In 1957, Schultz left Merck to join John Mauchly at Sperry Rand Univac Corporation. She was in her fourth month of pregnancy, and the Univac's insurers refused to allow her on site while she was pregnant.[4]: 32  During the interim, she worked on bibliographic projects such as Current Contents with Eugene Garfield.[12] Once her child was born, she joined Sperry Rand, where she worked on information retrieval research from 1958 to 1961.[4]: 34–37 

In the early 1960s, Schultz was involved in the automation of the Armed Services Technical Information Agency (ASTIA). She was also involved in developing systems specifications for the MEDLARS/MEDLINE system of the National Library of Medicine.[13][4]: 37–42 

From 1961 to 1970 she worked for the Institute for the Advancement of Medical Communication. She also taught afternoon and evening classes and counseled graduate students at Drexel University. She taught the first class to be offered at Drexel in "documentation", under the title "Search strategy", in the summer of 1962.[4]: 25 [14] She is credited with organizing Drexel's information science program, launched in 1963 by Dean John F. Harvey.[15][16][17][18]

In 1962, she served as the first female president of the American Documentation Institute (now the Association for Information Science and Technology).[19][20][21][4]: 51–52  She was also involved in starting Information Science Abstracts, which first appeared in 1966.[22]

From 1973 to 1982 she was Professor of Information Science and Director of Libraries at the Medical College of Pennsylvania. There she helped to establish the Florence A. Moore Library of Medicine.[4]: 46–48 [5]

She was one of the first people to try to document the history of information science.[23] Her papers are on deposit at the Charles Babbage Institute.[3] Having experienced the beginning of the information age, Schultz's perspective on the advent of the Internet was that it presented "a huge, formless haystack in which to find needles", which would make "for some very complex mixing and matching" in database searches.[24]

Schultz died of Alzheimer's disease, on May 28, 2015.[25]

Awards

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Library resources about
Claire Kelly Schultz
By Claire Kelly Schultz
  • Claire K. Schultz Papers, 1950-1980. Finding Aid. (CBI 86), Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
  • Online Catalog Record for the Claire Schultz Collection, 1960. Philadelphia, PA. {{cite book}}: |website= ignored (help)
  • Center for Oral History. "Claire K. Schultz". Science History Institute.
  • Williams, Robert V. (9 July 1997). Claire K. Schultz, Transcript of an Interview Conducted by Robert V. Williams at Line Lexington, Pennsylvania on 9 July 1997 (PDF). Philadelphia: Chemical Heritage Foundation.

References

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  1. ^ "Obituary For: Claire Kelly Schultz - Huff & Lakjer Funeral Home, Inc". huffandlakjer.com.
  2. ^ Williams, Robin V. (2015). "In Memoriam: Claire Kelly Schultz (1924-2015)" (PDF). Bulletin of the Association for Information Science and Technology. 41 (6). asist.org: 8–11. doi:10.1002/bult.2015.1720410606. Archived from the original (PDF) on 2016-03-04. Retrieved 2015-11-07.
  3. ^ a b Claire K. Schultz Papers, 1950-1980. Finding Aid. (CBI 86), Charles Babbage Institute, University of Minnesota, Minneapolis.
  4. ^ a b c d e f g h i j k l m n o p q Williams, Robert V. (9 July 1997). Claire K. Schultz, Transcript of an Interview Conducted by Robert V. Williams at Line Lexington, Pennsylvania on 9 July 1997 (PDF). Philadelphia: Chemical Heritage Foundation.
  5. ^ a b "Schultz wins Merit Award". Computerworld. December 15, 1980. Retrieved 16 November 2015.
  6. ^ Center for Oral History. "Claire K. Schultz". Science History Institute.
  7. ^ Williams, Robert V. "The use of punched cards in US libraries and documentation centers, 1936-1965." IEEE Annals of the History of Computing 2 (2002): 16-33.
  8. ^ Henderson, Madeline M. "Examples of early nonconventional technical information systems." Science Information Systems (1999): 169-176, page 173
  9. ^ Schultz, C. K. (1958). An application of random codes for literature searching. In R. S. Casey, J. W. Perry, M. M. Berry, & A. Kent (Eds.), Punched cards: Their applications to science and industry (2nd ed). New York: Reinhold Publishing
  10. ^ Schultz, Claire K. "A Career Turning Point". Pioneers of Information Science Scrapbook. p. 277. Archived from the original on 2016-03-05. Retrieved 2015-06-15.
  11. ^ Williams, Robert V., ed. (1999). "Claire Kelly Schultz". Pioneers of Information Science in North America. A Project of SIG/HFIS (History and Foundations of Information Science. Association for Information Science and Technology / American Society of Information Scientists (ASIS). Archived from the original on 2015-02-04. Retrieved 2015-06-15.
  12. ^ Wiliams, Robert V. (July 29, 1997). Eugene Garfield, Transcript of an Interview Conducted by Robert V. Williams at Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on 29 July 1997 (PDF). Philadelphia, PA: Chemical Heritage Foundation.
  13. ^ Bourne, Charles P.; Hahn, Truci Bellardo (2003). A history of online information services, 1963-1976. Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press. pp. 113, 199. ISBN 0-262-02538-8. Retrieved 9 November 2015.
  14. ^ Bohnert, Lea M. (1988). "1959-68 Dreams become realities" (PDF). Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science. June/July: 16–17. Archived from the original (PDF) on 5 March 2016. Retrieved 16 November 2015.
  15. ^ Rayward, W. Boyd (1995). Developing a profession of librarianship in Australia : travel diaries and other papers of John Wallace Metcalfe. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press. p. 335. ISBN 978-0-8108-2944-2. Retrieved 16 November 2015.
  16. ^ Garrison, Guy. "A Century of Library Education at Drexel University: Vignettes of Growth and Change." (1992).
  17. ^ Flood, Barbara (2000). "Drexel's information science M.S. degree program, 1963-1971: An insider's recollections". Journal of the American Society for Information Science. 51 (12): 1137–1148. doi:10.1002/1097-4571(2000)9999:9999<::AID-ASI1027>3.0.CO;2-V.
  18. ^ Taylor, Robert S. (1976). "On Education". Bulletin of ASIS. 2 (8): 34.
  19. ^ Williams, Robert V. "The changed and changing ADI/ASIS/ASIS&T after 75 years." Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 38.5 (2012): 32-38.
  20. ^ Schultz, Claire K. "Inaugural address of the incoming president." American Documentation 13.1 (1962): 129-130.
  21. ^ Farkas-Conn, Irene S. (1990). From documentation to information science : the beginnings and early development of the American Documentation Institute - American Society for Information Science. New York: Greenwood. ISBN 9780313255052. Archived from the original on 2015-09-29. Retrieved 2015-11-09.
  22. ^ Woods, Bill M. "Bibliographic Control of Serial Publications Archived 2015-11-17 at the Wayback Machine." Allerton Park Institute (16th: 1969) (1969).
  23. ^ Farkas-Conn, Irene S. (2012). The birth of information science. Archived from the original on 2016-02-19. Retrieved 2015-11-16.
  24. ^ Hunter-Lascoskie, Sarah (December 20, 2011). "First person: Claire Schultz". Chemical Heritage Foundation. Archived from the original on February 23, 2016. Retrieved November 17, 2015.
  25. ^ "Claire Kelly Schultz, 1924-2015". asis&t. Association for Information Science and Technology. 16 June 2015. Retrieved 11 November 2015.
  26. ^ "Award of Merit". asis&t. Archived from the original on 6 July 2014. Retrieved 9 November 2015.
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