Pauline Atherton Cochrane
Pauline Atherton Cochrane (1929 – July 29, 2024) was an American librarian and a highly cited expert in library and information sciences. She was a leading thinker on redesigning catalogues and indexes to provide better online subject access, and she taught and wrote about cataloging, indexing, and how people find information.
She earned a BA in social science from Illinois College in 1951, then worked as an indexer at the Corn Products Refining Company. She earned an MA in library science from Rosary College (now Dominican University) and worked as a reference librarian at the Chicago Public Library and Chicago Teacher's College before earning a PhD from the University of Chicago. Her research focused on classification, and she aimed to make Ranganathan’s ideas more accessible to North American library and information science researchers, educators, and students.
Cochrane helped found the Classification Research Study Group in the late 1950s, a group dedicated to developing knowledge organization theories and methods, inspired by Ranganathan’s ideas from India and England’s Classification Research Group.
In 1960 she became associate director of the Documentation Research Project at the American Institute of Physics, where she worked on A Project for the Development of a Reference Retrieval System for Physicists for four years. She identified four aspects of information retrieval for physicists—distinguishing between their roles as researchers and as authors—and used bibliometrics to improve the coverage of physics journals in Physics Abstracts.
In 1971 Cochrane became president of ASIS&T (the American Society for Information Science and Technology). Under her leadership, the society launched a continuing education program and began work on an international information science directory. She was awarded the ASIS&T Award of Merit in 1990.
She continued to help librarians use new technologies to help patrons find information and wrote a six-part continuing education series for American Libraries magazine titled Modern Subject Access in the Online Age. The series covered topics such as building a professional theory of how people seek information and recognizing information overload.
Cochrane died in Arthur, Illinois, on July 29, 2024, at the age of 94.
This page was last edited on 3 February 2026, at 18:55 (CET).