Helen Brownson

Helen Brownson (May 1, 1917 – August 5, 2017) was a United States federal government employee and a pioneer in the development of the field of information science. She is credited with popularizing the idea of the thesaurus as it applies to information science.

Education and early career Brownson was born in Kansas City, Kansas in 1917. She attended the University of Kansas, and graduated as a member of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society in 1938 with a major in Spanish and minors in English and French. She worked as a secretary in the coffee trade, employing her Spanish language skills to handle correspondence and spoken communication with businesses in South and Central America.

Selected publications