Great Bureaucrats (Henriette Avram)

The Post today carries the obit of a bureaucrat no one has heard of (perhaps Laura Bush did):

"Henriette D. Avram; Transformed Libraries :

Henriette D. Avram, whose far-reaching work at the Library of Congress replaced ink-on-paper card catalogues and revolutionized cataloguing systems at libraries worldwide, died April 22 of cancer at Baptist Hospital in Miami."

From the obit we learn that Ms Avram essentially created a metaclassification scheme, subsuming the Dewey decimal and others, that rapidly became a world standard. Perhaps even more impressive is the personal story behind the facts--no college, goes to work at NSA, becomes an early computer programmer, then to Library of Congress and ends up in charge of 1700 people! Oh, and raised 3 kids.

She did great at one of the essential jobs of a bureaucrat--creating abstract representations of reality.