PROFESSOR A.F.C. POLLARD
| Pages | 63-66 |
| Published date | 01 March 1948 |
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/eb026125 |
| Date | 01 March 1948 |
| Subject Matter | Information & knowledge management,Library & information science |
The Journal
of
DOCUMENTATION
Volume
4
SEPTEMBER
1948 Number 2
PROFESSOR
A. F. C. POLLARD
THE
sudden death, on 15 August 1948, of Professor Alan Faraday Campbell
Pollard will have profoundly shocked his many friends and colleagues.
Born in 1877, Professor Pollard was educated at Cheltenham; University
College, London; St. Bartholomew's Hospital; and King's College, London.
His early practical work on the technical staff of Messrs. Siemens Brothers'
Dynamo Works and as chief physicist to Nobel's Explosive Company led,
after a period of service in the Royal Scots Fusiliers, to his appointment in
1918 as head of the Instrument Section of the Technical Department, Aircraft
Production, with the rank of Captain in the Royal Air Force. A year later,
in 1919, he began his long association with the Imperial College of Science
when he was appointed to the chair of Optical Engineering and Instrument
Design, a position which he held till 1943, when he retired with the title
Emeritus Professor.
Professor Pollard's recognition of the value of the systematic filing of
references to sources of new information developed early. In 1896, while
still a student at Bart's, he experimented with a decimal classification of his
own, but gave it up in favour of Dewey. Then in 1908 he came into contact
with the International Institute of Bibliography and visited MM. Otlet and
La Fontaine at Brussels. Thereafter he became one of
the
champions of the
'Brussels System', now the Universal Decimal Classification, and persistently
and patiently worked for its introduction into British Libraries.
Dr. S. C. Bradford, in his tribute to Professor Pollard on the occasion of his
retirement from the Presidency of the British Society for International Bib-
liography in 1945, gives an account of these early attempts to convert British
librarians to the use of the U.D.C. It was a slow and thankless task which
had little success until 1925, when Dr. Bradford, long an enthusiast for the
U.D.C.,
became Keeper of the Science Museum Library. Further impetus
to the movement
was
given in
1927
when the British Society for International
Bibliography was formed with Professor Pollard as its first President. The
Society became the British section of the International Federation for Docu-
mentation, or International Institute of Bibliography as it was then called.
An invitation to nominate a British President was received from the 1927
Conference of the Institute; Professor Pollard was elected and held this office
till
1931,
presiding at International Conferences at Cologne in 1928, London
in 1929, and The Hague in 1931.
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