Henriette Avram - Career Beginnings

Career Beginnings

The couple moved first to Arlington, and later to Silver Spring. Once settled in Virginia, Avram left her life of homemaking behind. She began studying mathematics at George Washington University, and joined the NSA herself in 1952. Working with the IBM 701, she soon became one of the first computer programmers. Reminiscing about her time with the NSA, Avram said, “Learning programming in those days was…a bootstrap operation. You were on your own with far less than perfect tools to learn from…and the numbers of people that made it through to become programmers were few indeed. It was an exciting time.”

In the early sixties she moved to the private sector, working first with the American Research Bureau and later for a software company, Datatrol Corporation. Both jobs consisted of systems analysis and programming, but it was at Datatrol that Avram had her first professional experience with libraries. Asked to design a computer science library, she quickly read several library science text books in order to learn the appropriate jargon. She also hired a librarian to assist her in the design process. It was through this project that Avram was introduced to the Library of Congress Card Division Service. She also did consulting work with Frederick Kilgour, father of the Online Computer Library Center, on OCLC’s first attempt at computerizing bibliographic information. In March 1965, Avram heard of an opening at the Library of Congress, and was hired as a systems analyst in the Office of the Information Systems Specialist.