The chief proponent of the paperless society: Frederick Wilfrid Lancaster, 1933- 2013

PS. Thanks to Madhava Rao Adepu for this news.

"Nationally and internationally, Lancaster was recognized as a leader in the field of library and information science through his work as a teacher, writer, and scholar. My heart felt condolences. I prey to God for granting peace to the departed soul." By Pawan Kumar Gupta

Had there been a Nobel Prize in LIS it might have gone to him for sure. It is a great loss to the Library & Info . Nevertheless, he will continue to live through his mind storming ideas as well as many good books as on Indexing and abstracting.His brilliance will continue to inspire many .May God bless this departed soul. Dr M P Satija, UGC Emeritus fellow

Dr Lancaster delivered the Sarada Ranganathan Endowment Lecture in 1991. The title of the talk is 'Bibliometric Methods in Assessing, Productivity and Impact of research'; He was then Visiting Professor in DRTC; He also visited DRTC at least three times and delivered series of lectures; if I am correct, he also delivered a lecture in NCSI jointly organized with SRELS. Ravichandra Rao, Professor (Retd.), DRTC, Bangalore.

Info courtesy, extract from: Renner-Wikoff Chapel and Crematory and Champaign/Urbana News-Gazette

Frederick Wilfrid “Poppa Wills” “Stinky Cheese Grandpa” Lancaster, 79, of Urbana, passed away on Sunday, August 25, 2013 in his home.  

Wilf was born September 4, 1933, in Stanley, County Durham, England to Frederick and Mary (Blackburn) Lancaster.

Wilf graduated as an associate of the British Library Association from the University of Northumbria at Newcastle, England in 1955 and was named a Fellow of the Library Association of Great Britain in 1969. He began his professional career as a senior assistant at the Newcastle-upon-Tyne Public Libraries, the last closed access public library in the United Kingdom. He immigrated in 1959 to Akron, Ohio to become the Senior Librarian for Science and Technology at the Akron Public Library. It was in Akron where he met and married Maria Cesaria Volpe, in 1961. He worked as the technical librarian for the Babcock and Wilcox Company from 1960 until he returned to the U.K. in 1962 with his wife and young daughter to become a Senior Research Assistant at ASLIB in London. In 1964, he returned to the U.S., where he was integrally involved in the design and management of MEDLARS, the National Library of Medicine’s computerized bibliographic retrieval system for articles in academic journals in medicine and allied health professions. In 1970, he became an associate professor in the University of Illinois’s Graduate School of Library and Information Science and was named a full professor in 1972, a position he held until his retirement in 1992. He also was the editor of Library Trends, the academic journal of the GSLIS.

He was the author of 15 books, numerous of which were named book of the year by the American Society for Information Science or the American Library Association. He consulted on information storage and retrieval with organizations around the world as diverse as the Army Corp of Engineers, Standard Oil, UNESCO and the American Film Institute. He presented courses or guest lectures at more than 50 colleges and universities across the globe, from Brazil to Norway to China and was a keynote speaker or presenter at countless conferences.

Thrice he was awarded Fulbright teaching fellowships (an honor usually awarded only twice), was named a University of Illinois University Scholar for the final three years of his professorial career and he was an early predictor of electronic media and storage systems, coining the term the “paperless society” in 1977. Visitation will be held at 10:00 a.m. on Friday, August 30 at St. Patrick’s Catholic Church in Urbana with funeral mass to follow at 11:00 a.m. Interment will occur immediately thereafter at Clements Cemetery on Highcross Road, Urbana. Funeral lunch will follow at St. Patrick’s. In lieu of flowers, please make contributions to Save the Children or the World Wildlife Fund.

---------
This post is dedicated to the following quote:

A Compelling Future
Professor F. W. Lancaster’s protean legacy, still unfolding, encompasses four decades of excellent teaching, superb scholarship, and professional leadership. This essay will focus on his justly famous predictions about the paperless society and the future direction of libraries and the librarians who manage them. Although this aspect of his scholarship represents only one facet of his many contributions, it is perhaps the most often cited, invoked, and debated. It has been exactly three decades since Professor Lancaster launched his own library Sputnik, namely his transformative volume entitled Toward Paperless Information Systems (Lancaster, 1978a). in "Aftermath of a Prediction: F. W. Lancaster and the Paperless Society,"  Arthur P. Young

Curriculum Vitae for F. Wilfrid Lancaster - Project MUSE - Johns ...

Bibliometric methods in assessing productivity and impact of research (Sarada Ranganathan Endowment for Library Science Series) by F. Wilfrid Lancaster (Author)

Professor Emeritus F. W. Lancaster passes away | www.lis.illinois.edu