My father, Alan Pritchard, who has died aged 74, was a librarian who took a particular interest in literature on computers, writing a guide to the topic as early as 1969 and setting up a pioneering company providing computer-based geographical data to businesses just as the internet was taking off. But he had a wide range of other interests, and was also responsible for acclaimed bibliographies on literature about women and about alchemy.
Alan was born in Southsea, Hampshire, the only child of Frank, a wartime naval engineer, and Gladys (nee Blower). He attended Abingdon school, Oxfordshire, between 1953 and 1960, and then went to the University of Hull to study chemistry. Following a discussion with the university’s librarian, the poet Philip Larkin, he left to study librarianship at the North-Western Polytechnic School of Librarianship.
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