LHRT (Library History Round Table)

Dr. Hans Hanan Wellisch (1920 – 2004) was born in Vienna in 1920,  He was arrested on the street at the age of 18 after the German Kristallnacht of November 1938 and sent to Dachau Concentration Camp in Germany.

Israel

In 1949 he emigrated to Israel and was librarian in the Signal Corps. He was a founding member and secretary of the Israel Society of Special Libraries and Information Centers. 

• He wrote the first Hebrew textbook on the management of special libraries;
• compiled the first Hebrew filing code for libraries;
• initiated the compilation of the Hebrew-English-French-German Dictionary of library terms by a committee of the Academy of the Hebrew Language. 
• He was  active in the work of the International Federation for Documentation (FID) as a contributor to the Universal Decimal Classification.
• He oversaw the committee translating the abridgement of the UDC into Hebrew and compiled the index to the system.

United States

In 1967 the United Nations sponsored Wellisch for a study tour through the United States to study computerized information systems for libraries. His published papers in information and library journals led to an invitation by the University of Maryland's College of Library and Information Services (now College of Information)  as a visiting lecturer.

He  joined the American Society of Indexers (ASI) in 1970, and for many years was ASI's representative to the National Information Standards Organization, and a member of the committee developing the revision of the American National Standard for thesaurus construction. 

At the first International conference of the UK Society of Indexers, in 1978, he delivered the paper, `Early multilingual and multiscript indexes in herbals', the first of a series of contributions  to The Indexer. These included:

• `The alphabetization of prepositions in indexes',
• `"Indexes" and "indexing" in encyclopedias',
• `From the 17th century: a German instruction in indexing',
• `More on indexes in encyclopedias',
• `"Index": the word, its history, meanings and usages',
• `Incunabula indexes'.

Wellisch earned the Ph.D. at Maryland (based on a thesis on script conversion - transliteration and transcription) in 1975. 

Dr. Wellisch organized, and edited the Proceedings of the International PRECIS Workshop at the University of Maryland in 1976. 

In 1980 his book,  Indexing and abstracting: an international bibliography ( ABC-Clio) was published.

He was was promoted to Professor in 1981 at the University of Maryland.

He was president of the American Society of Indexers from 1984-85. 

His bio-bibliography of first editions of the works of Conrad Gessner (1984)  was the basis of the Brill microfiche collection, Conrad Gessner: Opera Omnia.

His research interests  included:

• linguistic aspects of information science;
• theory and practice of classification and the subject analysis of texts;
• problems of script conversion (e.g. Romanization) as it affects the retrieval of information;
• history of books and indexes;
• standardization of information work - as well as the physical planning and architecture of libraries.

At his retirement in 1987 he was honored as Professor emeritus at the University of Maryland, College of Information.

In 1991 Dr. Wellisch translated Rudolf Blum's Kallimachos: The Alexandrian Library and the Origins of Bibliography for the University of Wisconsin Press.

In 1991 he published  Indexing from A to Z.  (2nd edition 1995). 

Selected 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 (translator). 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.

Sources

USC Shoah Foundation Institute testimony of Hans Wellisch: https://collections.ushmm.org/search/catalog/vha22880

Bell, Hazel (1998). "Personalities in Publishing: Hans Wellisch."  Journal of Scholarly Publishing. 29 (4).

"Hans Wellisch Obituary."  The Washington Post. 2004-02-06.

Wellisch, Hans H. (1998-05-11). "Hans H. Wellisch: Cultivating the Garden of Librarianship". Cataloging & Classification Quarterly. 25 (4): 289–304.