Fran Waranius, An Appreciation of a Long Time PAM Member
Brenda Corbin, Librarian Emeritus, U. S. Naval Observatory
April 2008
PAM member Fran Waranius passed away on September 11, 2007, following a valiant fight against scleroderma. Having joined SLA in 1953 (!), she was an active member of PAM from the 1970s, soon after it was formed as a provisional division. Although Fran retired in 1993, she retained her membership in SLA and PAM until her death. In the May 1998 PAM Bulletin (vol. 25 no. 4), she wrote a nice overview of her retirement activities under the title, "News from Retired Member."
http://units.sla.org/division/dpam/pam-bulletin/vol25/no4/retired.htm
Fran’s PAM positions included Co-editor of the PAM Bulletin (1976-1978) and Chair of the Nominating Committee (1981-1982). At the 1988 Annual Meeting she was Chair of the Astronomy Workshop (now called Astronomy Roundtable).
She joined the Lunar Science Institute (later called the Lunar and Planetary Institute) Library in 1970. As librarian of this NASA sponsored institute in Houston TX, she was at the forefront of automation for small libraries. In SLA’s own journal she and Stephen H. Tellier published the following article in 1986: "House Automation of a Small Library Using a Mainframe Computer" Special Libraries, V. 77 N. 3, Summer 1986, 162-169.
Fran also is credited with saving space history. In a book review in New Scientist of Don E. Wilhelms’ To a Rocky Moon: A Geologist's History of Lunar Exploration (Univ. Arizona Press, 1993), reviewer Tony Jones notes the following from the book: "Fran Waranius, librarian at the Lunar and Planetary Institute in Houston, Texas, is one of the unsung heroines of space exploration. At the end of the Apollo programme she was horrified to see the staff of the neighbouring Johnson Space Center (mission control for NASA) throwing out its large collection of Lunar Orbiter and Apollo photographs, maps and mission documents. She and a colleague rescued them from the rubbish cart and they are to this day preserved in the institute's archives." http://www.newscientist.com:80/article/mg13818795.600-review-geologists-reach-for-the-moon-.html
The Lunar and Planetary Information Bulletin (which Fran started in 1974) had an article about her career upon her retirement in 1993. Dr Bevan French states "Fran was essentially an active and effective member of the planetary science community. She had a marvelous rapport with both the established scientists and the new young investigators, and a lot of library and education business got done as the result of conversations with people who just dropped by LPI to say hello to Fran." This is networking of the greatest sort and is what many PAM librarians have long practiced.
Those of us who joined PAM in the mid-1970s and later clearly remember her warm and welcoming nature. She seemed in some sense a "housemother" of PAM. It was always a pleasure to chat with her during the PAM Open Houses.
After retirement Fran’s high energy and organizational skills were directed towards the Texas Bluebonnet Chapter of the Scleroderma Foundation. She founded this Texas Chapter in 1995 with the theme "You’re Not Alone." Scleroderma is defined as a chronic, autoimmune connective tissue disease, and the word scleroderma literally means hard skin.
We remember and honor Fran’s contributions to the LPI library, PAM, her astronomy colleagues and her work with the Scleroderma Foundation.
