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The Passing of Henriette Avram

Sarah Thomas

Two weeks ago my inbox started filling up with news of the death of Henriette Avram, the former Associate Librarian of Congress and “Mother of MARC.”  Because I started my professional life as a cataloger, I soon became aware of Henriette, a petite older woman (she was probably about as old as I am now when I first encountered her in person, but she seemed quite august to me) who was a formidable force in bibliographic control.  I imagine the first sighting would have been at an ALA meeting, where she held court attended by a retinue of others from the Library of Congress, including Lucia Rather, the director of cataloging (whom I succeeded); Sally McCallum, the chief of the Network Development and MARC Standards Office; and Beacher Wiggins, then Henriette’s assistant and my successor as director for cataloging. 

I was very much awed by Henriette, a woman of immense confidence and presence despite her small stature.  Her fame and authority derived from her having developed the MARC format, the code that brought card catalogs online and laid the foundation for OPACS and electronic resource sharing.  Her contribution revolutionized libraries.  She was not a librarian but came to LC in 1965, having worked at the National Security Agency in the early days of computer programming.  Charged with automating the card catalog, she created the machine-readable cataloging format in 1968, and it went into use at LC in 1970.  By 1975, when I was working at Harvard as a cataloger, the MARC format had already enabled the foundation of OCLC, transforming the way in which cataloging was done, facilitating the sharing of records, and ushering in the efficiencies of copy cataloging and standardization.

A few years later, in 1983, when I was an academic management intern with the Council on Library Resources and based at the University of Georgia, I attended a special conference at Linda Hall Library in Kansas City, where I had a close encounter with Henriette.  She invited me to interview for a position at LC, assistant chief of the MARC Editorial Division, and one hot July 4th weekend, I made my way to Washington.  At LC, Henriette introduced me to the division chief, an ex-Navy man who asked me if I loved the MARC format, to which I replied that I knew it, but I didn’t know if to know it was to love it.  This fellow seemed to work and speak with a military precision that felt quite alien to me, and I asked him if he thought he could work with a woman who didn’t have her pencils all sharpened and lined up in orderly rows on her desk.  He responded that that wasn’t an obstacle, but I couldn’t help feeling that as he escorted me from the Adams Building  to the Madison Building, it wasn’t a good omen that he stopped with me in front of the bulletin board posting job vacancies and pointed out other openings.  I went back home and pursued another offer from the National Agricultural Library.  I was thus stunned, late one August afternoon, to receive a call offering me the position.  Fletcher, then two, was sitting on a stool at the kitchen sink washing dishes with me, and I took the call in another room so I would have a more-professional environment.  As I wondered nervously if there were any knives in the dishwater and listened to Fletcher’s happy prattle, I turned the offer down, forgoing the chance to work closely with Henriette.

Instead, I moved to Beltsville, Maryland.  As the head of technical services at the National Agricultural Library, I discovered that the heads of bibliographic access at the three national libraries worked together on a regular basis, giving me, in charge of a hundred  people, the opportunity to interact with Henriette, who oversaw thousands of staff.  It was an amazing and inspiring experience.  Henriette was very focused and intelligent, and clearly in charge, but she was also kind to a novice in the government.  Seven years later she retired from LC, as did her close colleague, Lucia Rather.  A few months later, in 1992, I found myself appointed director for cataloging, when I commenced rocking the boat.  Henriette was a frequent visitor, and I always looked forward to seeing her.  Nonetheless, I knew we were entering a new phase in our relationship when she stopped me in the ladies’ room, looked disapprovingly at me, and pronounced: “It’s all wrong.”  She was letting me know she disagreed with the direction I was heading in cataloging, a direction that used to make me fear I might end up with “The Woman Who Ruined LC Cataloging” on my tombstone.  (Fortunately, I can now pass along that fear to Karen Calhoun, who is proposing far more radical changes to cataloging).  It was a new stage in my professional life, when I could forge ahead with what I thought was right, even in the face of strong disapproval from someone I respected so highly.

For several years after her retirement Henriette Avram continued to attend ALA, and when she would appear, she would be encircled by a coterie of admirers, including me.  In the last few years, with the rise of the Internet and metadata, there have been many articles in the vein of “Is MARC Dead?”  Although we might imagine a post-MARC world sometime in the future, the achievements of the MARC format and the advances it has enabled are revolutionary, and they provide the basis on which we move forward. With Henriette Avram’s passing, we are experiencing the end of an era, and we are advancing to a new stage in which other bold thinkers and doers will shape our future.  Yet, Henriette Avram has left her mark on libraries, and her influence will carry forward.

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