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 The International Federation for Information and Documentation (FID) was an international organization that was created to promote universal access to all recorded knowledge through the creation of an international classification system. FID stand ...

), contributing to the

Universal Decimal Classification The Universal Decimal Classification (UDC) is a bibliographic and library classification representing the systematic arrangement of all branches of human knowledge organized as a coherent system in which knowledge fields are related and inter-lin ...

. He headed the committee which translated the abridgement of the UDC into Hebrew and was the compiler of the index to the system. Wellisch had a younger brother, Ellie, and was the son of a newspaper advertising father and secretary turned housewife mother. He was set to graduate after eight years of European high school, which entitled him to enrollment in a university. Even though Wellisch’s academic career was straightforward at this point in his life, he was destined to take a different path. 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. 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 Dachau (, ; , ; ) was one of the first concentration camps built by Nazi Germany and the longest-running one, opening on 22 March 1933. The camp was initially intended to intern Hitler's political opponents, which consisted of communists, s ...

. When arrested he already had a visa to Sweden, so he was sent there after two and a half months. There he briefly worked in the special library of the Swedish Cooperative Federation which gave him some training in librarianship. He emigrated to Israel in 1949 where he was the librarian of the Signal Corps of the Israel Defense Forces. He received a grant from the United Nations to study at the

University of Maryland The University of Maryland, College Park (University of Maryland, UMD, or simply Maryland) is a public land-grant research university in College Park, Maryland, United States. Founded in 1856, UMD is the flagship institution of the Univ ...

in 1967. The university invited him to join the School of Library Science as a visiting lecturer two years later. 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. He retired from UMD in 1989 as a full professor. He was the first recipient of the

American Society for Indexing American(s) may refer to: * American, something of, from, or related to the United States of America, commonly known as the "United States" or "America" ** Americans, citizens and nationals of the United States of America ** American ancestry, p ...

Award for the index to his book, ''The Conversion of Scripts: Its Nature, History and Utilization''. He also won the Hines Award for "continuous dedicated and exceptional service" to the ASI where he was president from 1984 to 1985.

Personal life

Wellisch was born in Vienna. He was married to Shulamith Wellisch, and the couple had three children Tamar, Ilana and Yuval Wellisch.

Publications

*Wellisch, H. H. (1975). ''Transcription and transliteration: An annotated bibliography on conversion of scripts.'' Silver Spring, Md: Institute of Modern Languages. *Wellisch, Hans (Hanan) (June 1975). "Conrad Gessner: a bio-bibliography". ''Journal of the Society for the Bibliography of Natural History''. 7 (2): 151–247. *Wellisch, H. H. (1976). “Relative Importance of the World’s Major Scripts.” ''Libri: International Journal of Libraries & Information Services'' 26 (September): 238–50. *Wellisch, Hans H. (1977). ''The PRECIS index system: principles, applications, and prospects : proceedings of the International PRECIS Workshop'', October 15–17, 1976. New York: Wilson. *Wellisch, H. H. (1978). ''The conversion of scripts, its nature, history, and utilization''. New York: Wiley. *Wellisch. Hans H. (1978). “Script Conversion and Bibliographic Control of Documents in Dissimilar Scripts: Problems and Alternatives.” ''International Library Review'' 10 (January): 3–22. *Wellisch, Hans H. (1980). “Bibliographic Access to Multilingual Collections.” ''Library Trends'' 29 (October): 223–44. *Wellisch, H. H. (1980). ''Indexing and abstracting: An international bibliography.'' Santa Barbara, Calif: ABC-Clio. *Wellisch, Hans H. (1981). “Ebla: The World's Oldest Library.” ''The Journal of Library History'' 16, no. 3, 1981, pp. 488–500. *Wellisch, Hans H. (1983). “ALA Filing Rules: Flowcharts Illustrating Their Application, with a Critique and Suggestions for Improvement.” ''Journal of the American Society for Information Science'' 34 (September): 313–30. *Wellisch, H. H., & Gessner, C. (1984). ''Conrad Gessner: A bio-bibliography.'' Zug, Switzerland: IDC. *Wellisch, Hans, H. (1986). "The Oldest Printed Indexes." ''The Indexer'' 15 no 2 October., pp. 1–10. *Wellisch, Hans H. (1986). The First Arab Bibliography : Fihrist Al-ʻUlum. Occasional Papers / University of Illinois, Graduate School of Library and Information Science: No. 175. Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. *Wellisch, Hans H. (1991). ''Indexing from A to Z.'' Bronx, N.Y.: H.W. Wilson. *Wellisch, Hans H. (1994). “Incunabula Indexes.” ''Indexer'' 19 (April): 3–12. *Wellisch, Hans H. (1998) "Cultivating the Garden of Librarianship". ''Cataloging & Classification Quarterly'', 25:4, 289-304.

References

1920 births 2004 deaths Indexers Austrian Jews People from Vienna Austrian expatriates in Sweden Austrian emigrants to Israel Israeli emigrants to the United States Historians of libraries {{Library-bio-stub