Another Library Pioneer Passes Away - Founder of Lexis

The Law Librarian Blog posted today about the death on November 12 of H. Donald Wilson, the first president of Mead Data Central, the developer of what became LexisNexis.

The post provides links to obituaries in The New York Times and The Washington Post.

The Post article mentions that Wilson "died of a heart attack ... in front of his computer".

Earlier Library Boy posts on "library pioneers" include:

• The "Patron Saints" of Our Profession (August 2, 2006): "The founder of OCLC, Frederick G. Kilgour, died Monday, age 92. We don’t often celebrate the 'patron saints' of our profession, the people who laid the intellectual foundations of what we do everyday. Panizzi, Dewey, Cutter, Lubetzky, Ranganathan, Garfield, Vannevar Bush, Vincent Cerf. And Kilgour. When you stop to think of it, we would be drowning in one huge mess had it not been for our predecessors who came up with the rules for cataloguing, the field of citation analysis, the logic of hypertext or the structure for OCLC."
• Online Tribute to OCLC Founder and Library Pioneer Frederick Kilgour (October 23, 2006): "Next Tuesday, October 31, 2006, there will be a tribute to Frederick G. Kilgour, the librarian who founded OCLC in 1967. Kilgour, a pioneer of library automation and the creator of the planet's largest online catalogue Worldcat, died this summer."