Berman was natural inside Chicago, Illinois. He attended University of California at Los Angeles, where he earned the B.A. in Political Science with minors in Sociology, Anthropology and English, and received the Phi Beta Kappa from the national scholastic honour society. When getting an M.S. in Library Science from the Catholic University of America in Washington, D.C., Berman began work as a librarian. He worked for the U.S. Army Favorite Services Libraries, West Germany (1962-1966) ; Schiller College, Kleiningerheim, West Germany (1966-1967) ; University of California at Los Angeles Research Library (1967-1968) ; University of Zambia Library, Lusaka, Zambia (1968-1970) ; Makerere Institute of Social Research, Makerere University Library, Kampala, Uganda (1971-1972) ; and Hennepin County Library, Minnesota (1973-1999).

Alternative classification

A spark of Berman's cataloging revolution was a inclusion within Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) of the term kaffir, which he came through when working within Zambia : "Berman was told by offended black fellow-workers that calling someone a kafir was similar to being called a nigger in America" (Pendergrast).

This motivated him to write a book Bias & Antipathies: The Tract on the Lc Subject Heads On Population, which he is better known for. Using Bibliothec James P. Danky, he has been a editor for Guide Library Literature, (1982-2001) the biennial compilatiin of guide essays on librarianship from either the wide kind of more sources.