Luraine Tansey (née Collins) (January 29, 1918 – June 18, 2014) was an American slide librarian who created the first Universal Slide Classification System in 1969 with Wendell Simons. Tansey worked to develop a "universal" slide classification scheme that would serve the needs of both catalogers and patrons. Co-authored by Wendell Simons, it was published in 1969 under the title, ''A slide classification system for the organization and automatic indexing of interdisciplinary collections of slides and pictures''. Created mostly during her tenure at the

University of California, Santa Cruz The University of California, Santa Cruz (UC Santa Cruz or UCSC) is a public university, public Land-grant university, land-grant research university in Santa Cruz, California. It is one of the ten campuses in the University of California syste ...

in the late 1960s-early 1970s, this system is still in use at UCSC and other institutions and is known as the ''Tansey'' or ''Santa Cruz'' system. This system was also built with computer indexing in mind. Tansey worked with the College Art Association (CAA) for the benefit of librarians and image librarians. Her work contributed to the eventual founding of two professional societies, the

Art Libraries Society of North America The Art Libraries Society of North America (also known as ARLIS/NA) was founded in 1972. It is an organization made up of approximately 1,000 art librarians, library students and visual resource professionals. Activities ARLIS/NA organizes activ ...

(ARLIS/NA) and the

Visual Resources Association The Visual Resources Association (also known as VRA) is an international organization for image media professionals. VRA was founded in 1982 by slide librarians (visual resources curators) who were members of the College Art Association (CAA), t ...

(VRA). In 1993 she received both the VRA and ARLIS/NA's Distinguished Service Awards. In 1993, Tansey underwrote the VRA Travel Awards Program; several Luraine Tansey Travel Awards are still awarded each year. Luraine Tansey worked on several lectures and publications throughout the 1970’s. Her work “Potential Uses of Slide Classification Data Bases in Art History,” was in 1st international Conference of Art History Volume II in Pisa, Italy in 1978. “Classification of Research Photographs and Slides,” was published in Library Trends, January 1975. Slide Collection Index Application was published in International Business Machines, 1973. She also assisted her husband, Dr. Richard Tansey, with editing five editions of ''Gardner's Art Through the Ages'' as a bibliographer, and she worked on the index in Cohen’s ''Study Guide for Art through the Ages.'' Tansey was born in

Manhattan, Kansas Manhattan is a city and county seat of Riley County, Kansas, United States, although the city extends into Pottawatomie County. It is located in northeastern Kansas at the junction of the Kansas River and Big Blue River. As of the 2020 cen ...

. Tansey had four sons, one of whom is

Mark Tansey Mark Tansey (born 1949) is an American painter. Life Tansey had an early introduction to art. These early childhood experiences had a profound effect on Tansey's painting style from the inception of his career as an artist. Many of Tansey's pa ...

. She died June 18, 2014, in

Bristol, Rhode Island Bristol is a town in Bristol County, Rhode Island, US as well as the historic county seat. The town is built on the traditional territories of the Pokanoket Wampanoag. It is a deep water seaport named after Bristol, England. The population of B ...

References

External links

ARLIS VRD Biography

Obituary
{{DEFAULTSORT:Tansey, Luraine American librarians American women librarians People from Manhattan, Kansas University of California, Santa Cruz faculty 1918 births 2014 deaths 21st-century American women