Hans Wellisch
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Hans Hanan Wellisch (April 25, 1920 – February 6, 2004) was a librarian, LIS educator, and indexer known for his work with the International Federation for Documentation (later International Federation for Information and Documentation), contributing to the Universal Decimal Classification.[1] He headed the committee which translated the abridgement of the UDC into Hebrew and was the compiler of the index to the system.[2]
Wellisch had a younger brother, Ellie, and was the son of a newspaper advertising father and secretary turned housewife mother.[3][4] He was set to graduate after eight years of European high school, which entitled him to enrollment in a university.[4] Even though Wellisch’s academic career was straightforward at this point in his life, he was destined to take a different path.[4] His road to becoming a writer and teacher of classification and cataloging was quite different than many of his other peers within the same field.[4]
After graduating from high school and just a few weeks before receiving his matriculation certification, Wellisch was arrested in November 1938 and sent to Dachau concentration camp.[1][5] When arrested he already had a visa to Sweden, so he was sent there after two and a half months.[1] There he briefly worked in the special library of the Swedish Cooperative Federation which gave him some training in librarianship.[1] He emigrated to Israel in 1949 where he was the librarian of the Signal Corps of the Israel Defense Forces.[1]
He received a grant from the United Nations to study at the University of Maryland in 1967. The university invited him to join the School of Library Science as a visiting lecturer two years later.[2] He worked there for the rest of his professional career, and earned a Masters in Library Science in 1972 and a Ph.D. in 1975.[2]
Wellisch organized, and edited the Proceedings of the International PRECIS Workshop at the University of Maryland in 1976. [6] His bio-bibliography of first editions of the works of Conrad Gessner[7][8] was the basis of the Brill microfiche collection, Conrad Gessner: Opera Omnia.[9]
He retired from UMD in 1989 as a full professor.[2]
In 1991 he translated Rudolf Blum's Kallimachos:The Alexandrian Library and the Origins of Bibliography. [10]
He was the first recipient of the American Society for Indexing Award for the index to his book, The Conversion of Scripts: Its Nature, History and Utilization.[2] He also won the Hines Award for "continuous dedicated and exceptional service" to the ASI where he was president from 1984 to 1985.[2]
