26 Facts About Jesse Shera

Jesse Hauk Shera was an American librarian and information scientist who pioneered the use of information technology in libraries and played a role in the expansion of its use in other areas throughout the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.

Jesse Shera was born in Oxford, Ohio on December 8,1903, the only child of parents Charles, and Jessie Shera.

Jesse Shera's hometown of Oxford was a farming community and the home of Miami University.

Jesse Shera lived in Oxford until after he obtained his undergraduate degree from Miami University.

Jesse Shera later went on to earn a master's degree in English literature from Yale University in 1927 and a Doctorate from the University of Chicago Graduate Library School in 1944, advised by Louis Round Wilson with Pierce Butler on his committee.

In 1928, Jesse Shera returned to Miami University and took a temporary job in the library as an assistant cataloguer and later in the year took a job as a research associate and bibliographer with the Scripps Foundation for Research in Population Problems.

Jesse Shera remained a part of this project through 1938.

Jesse Shera hoped to become a college English teacher but never succeeded due to the depression and a lack of available teaching positions in colleges and universities.

Jesse Shera studied and wrote on the history and philosophy of libraries often, and considered the work of libraries to be one of humanistic endeavor.

On librarian "neutrality", Jesse Shera warned in a 1935 address to the College and University Section of the American Library Association.

In 1940, Jesse Shera accepted an appointment with the Library of Congress as chief of the census library project.

In 1944 the same year Jesse Shera obtained his Doctorate in library science, he was named the associate director of libraries for the University of Chicago.

Jesse Shera became a member of the University of Chicago Graduate Library School faculty as an assistant professor in 1947.

In 1952 Jesse Shera became dean of the library school of Western Reserve University, expanding its faculty and adding a doctoral program within a few years.

Also in 1952, Jesse Shera took over as head of the American Documentation Institute.

In 1955 Shera teamed with James W Perry and Allen Kent to found the Center for Documentation and Communication Research, which advised industry, government and higher education on information systems.

Waples dealt with social effects of reading, and asked the basic questions of the new discipline that Jesse Shera named social epistemology.

Jesse Shera wrote and spoke about every type of librarianship from public to special and the history thereof.

Jesse Shera wrote numerous books and articles and served as the editor of a number of library and information science related journals.

Between 1947 and 1952 Jesse Shera was an associate editor for Library Quarterly, and from 1952 to 1955 he served as an advisory editor.

Jesse Shera was an editor for American Documentation from 1953 to 1959.

Jesse Shera was an advisory editor of the Journal of Cataloging and Classification from 1947 to 1957.

Jesse Shera served as editor of the Western Reserve University Press from 1954 to 1957.

Jesse Shera championed technology and stated "that the computer would revolutionize libraries" but urged careful use of it, rather than subservience to it.

Jesse Shera wrote of the progress made over the last century in 1976, in an article he wrote for the Library Journal entitled "Failure and Success: Assessing a Century".

Jesse Shera was elected as a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science shortly before his death on March 8,1982, aged 78.