JESSE HAUK SHERA: IN MEMORIAM

Abstract

Jesse Shera was my friend for twenty‐five years, but I knew him well by reputation for much longer. We first met at the Dorking Classification Conference in 1957, where he had been invited, along with Ranganathan, to give one of the two keynote addresses. At Dorking, he impressed us all by the wide range of his reading, the way he related classification theory to the process of concept formation and ordering. His calm, thoughtful appearance was belied by the keen sense of humour and the dry flashes of wit which constantly enlivened his speech and his writing; and I remember well his wry remark, on the occasion of some belligerence by members of the CRG, ‘I'm supposed to be a defender of classification in the US!’ Later, he invited me to Cleveland, where I was able to see for myself the respect and great affection in which he was held by all his colleagues and students. He was a great teacher, and his life‐long experience was solidified into the great book on Foundations of Education for Librarianship. I have occasionally felt that this momentous volume does not fully display his great gifts as a writer. Perhaps, towards the end of his life, he felt the weightiness of his thinking ought to be set down in an equally weighty manner. But especially in his short papers he was a model of incisive thought, forceful, witty, and demonstrating his great ability to fetch simile and metaphor from any part of a number of literatures. It was a pleasure to edit two volumes of his papers, and I have no doubt that generations of students of librarianship and information science will derive the same pleasure as I did from reading and re‐reading these reflections covering more than thirty years of active professional life. It was by no means an arduous job, but highly educative and only rarely did I feel it necessary to make an occasional adjustment. For Shera was not averse to re‐using a sentence or even a paragraph which he liked, and which he felt summarized his thinking in the most appropriate way. And he was right in this, for such happy repetitions formed links between the various subjects which he had dwelt upon.

Citation

FOSKETT, D.J. (1982), "JESSE HAUK SHERA: IN MEMORIAM", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 38 No. 4, pp. 314-314. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb026735