About

 

David Bawden

David Bawden

I am Professor of Information Science at City University London, and have been with the University since 1990. After doing a first degree in chemistry, I changed direction, and studied for a masters in Information Studies and then a PhD in Information Science. I worked for several years in pharmaceutical research information, before coming back into academic life.

I’m mainly involved with City’s Postgraduate MSc Information Studies Scheme. I teach courses on history, philosophy and basic concepts of the library/information sciences, information organisation, information management and policy, subject-specialist information provision, and libraries, publishing and information society.

I’m the editor of Journal of Documentation, the leading European journal of library/information science, and am on the editorial boards of Portal: Libraries and the Academy, and ATLA: Alternatives to Laboratory Animals.

My main professional interests (teaching, research, consultancy, etc.) are quite wide, but fall into four main areas:

  • foundations of LIS, including philosphical and conceptual issues, the history and the future of information communication, LIS research agenda and methodology, and curriculum development for LIS teaching and training
  • knowledge organisation, especially taxonomies and thesauri
  • domain analysis, including information resources and information behaviour in specific subject areas
  • some aspects of information management, particularly ways of assessing the value and impact of information services, and ways of overcoming the ‘dark side’ of an information-saturated world
  • I regularly run training courses for Aslib, and sometimes for other institutions, in areas of information management and information organisation.

    Internationally, I work with the library science departments at the Universities of Ljubljana, Vilnius and Zagreb, and the Charles University Prague, in collaborative projects and exchanges. In the past I’ve ben a consultant/evaluator for the Open Society institute Information program, and taught a summer school for library/information specialists at the Central European University in Budapest for five years.

    Please click here for my university home page and some of my publications, including some self-archived papers. My Del.ic,ious bookmarks to favourite web sites are here, and a selection of my book collection on LibraryThing is here.

    I am an occasional tweeter @david_bawden [please note the underscore]

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