Ted Hines

Who was Ted Hines?

Theodore Christian "Ted Hines was a Washington, D.C.-born pioneer in the use of microcomputers and microcomputer programs in libraries. He attended undergraduate school at George Washington University and received his Masters of Library Science in 1958 and a PhD in 1960 both from Rutgers University. He began his career as a children's librarian, and later became a professor of Library Science at Rutgers, followed by Columbia University, and the University of North Carolina at Greensboro.

With his wife, Lois Winkel, he designed an indexing program called the Children’s Media Databank. The program was first constructed on a mainframe computer, and then transferred to a microcomputer for patron use. This program allowed a patron to search for children's books by subject and reading level. A sample search query might be a 3rd grader with a 6th grade reading level on the subject of clouds.

Hines convened the first meeting of the American Society of Indexers in 1968. The ASI considers him its "founding father", and set up the Theodore C. Hines Award in his honour in 1993.