Helen Brownson (May 1, 1917 – August 5, 2017) was a United States federal government employee and a pioneer in the development of the field of information science.
[3] She attended the University of Kansas, and graduated as a member of the Phi Beta Kappa honor society in 1938 with a major in Spanish and minors in English and French.
She worked as a secretary in the coffee trade, employing her Spanish language skills to handle correspondence and spoken communication with businesses in South and Central America.
Following the termination of the CMR in 1947, Brownson became the secretary for the Special Committee on Technical Information (SCTI) of the government's Joint Research and Development Board.
Following her retirement, Brownson volunteered her services at the Smithsonian Institution, where she applied her skills to cross-indexing materials related to music and art.