Claire Kelly Schultz, 1924-2015

Posted on June 16, 2015 by ASIS&T Staff

Claire Kelly Schultz, 1924-2015: In Memoriam

Claire Kelly Schultz, former president of the American Documentation Institute (ADI), predecessor of ASIST, died in her home town of Line Lexington, PA on May 28 at the age of 90. The cause of death was Alzheimers disease. She was president of ADI in 1962 and received the Award of Merit in 1982. She was active in many different aspects of the life of ADI and was perhaps the first member to take a keen interest in the history of ADI and information science.

She was a 1944 graduate of Juniata College and attended the Woman’s Medical College of Pennsylvania  from 1945-46. She received the MS degree from Drexel Institute in 1946. After a brief time working for the Wistar Institute as a research associate she worked as the librarian at Merck, Sharp and Dohme Labs, from 1949 to 1957, where she began some of her early explorations of machine literature searching using Remington Rand’s electronic sorters. This work brought her to the attention of John W. Mauchley, developer of the Univac computer, who hired her to work for him on information retrieval problems from 1958 to 1961. She was a research scientist for the Institute for Advancement of Medical Communications in Philadelphia from 1961 to 1970. From about 1972 to her retirement she was the Director of Libraries at the Medical College of Pennsylvania, a free-lance consultant and part-time teacher of documentation at Drexel University, where she developed one of the first courses in the U.S. on documentation.

She authored a number of articles on special libraries, documentation, information retrieval, indexing, and thesaurus construction. A short biographical statement and links to photographs may be found at: https://www.asist.org/pioneers/claire-kelly-schultz/.

A complete bio-bibliography of her works may be found in her oral history at the Chemical Heritage Foundation: http://www.chemheritage.org/discover/collections/oral-histories/details/schultz-claire-k.aspx  Her papers are on deposit at the Babbage Institute of the University of Minnesota.

Robert V. Williams
Univ. of South Carolina
School of Library and Information Science