Pioneering women in information science

This Panel examines the lives and work in information science of six pioneering women Helen Brownson, Elfreda Chatman, Edith Ditmas, Margaret Egan, Barbara Kyle, and Phyllis Richmond. In careers that collectively span more than seventy years, these women have had tremendous impact on our field. Yet the full extent of their influence has often gone unrecognized in the secondary literature. In this session, we will seek to reveal these pioneers' contributions in such areas as documentation, classification, information retrieval, and social epistemology; to identify reasons for the historical neglect of some of these contributions; and to provide links to our past that will enhance our understanding of current theory and practice in the field of library and information science.