Hans H. Wellisch

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. 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. When arrested he already had a visa to Sweden, so he was sent there after two and a half months. His bio-bibliography of first editions of the works of Conrad Gessner was the basis of the Brill microfiche collection, Conrad Gessner: Opera Omnia.

He retired from UMD in 1989 as a full professor.

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.

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. Blum, Rudolf, and Hans H. Wellisch. 1991. Kallimachos : The Alexandrian Library and the Origins of Bibliography. Madison, Wis.: University of Wisconsin Press. 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.