Research and professional

My interests (research, scholarship and consultancy) fall into five main areas:

  • the historical and philosophical foundations of the information sciences, including the relations to the concept of information in the physical and biological sciences, and the idea of information science as a liberal art, and education and training for library/information science
  • aspects of information-related behaviour and information seeking: especially digital literacy, the ‘dark’ side of information, browsing and ‘creative’ information seeking, and personality factors in information access
  • subject specific information, especially scientific information, including aspects of knowledge organisation, such as thesauri and taxonomies
  • history of information provision and of the library/information sciences
  • information research methods for building qualitative conceptual understanding, including discourse analysis, content analysis, and historical analysis

    • A subset of my publications, exemplifying these areas, is here.

    I also have a strong interest in the link between theory and practice in the information sciences, stemming from my experience as a practitioner for twelve years in research information services in the pharmaceutical industry.

    Most of my work is individual scholarship, together with supervision of research students and masters dissertation students.

    I was programme director for the CoLIS 7 conference held in London in 2010, and am a member of the international advisory board for the CoLIS 8 conference to be held in Copenhagen in 2013. I believe that this series of conference encapsulates the best of academic research in the information sciences.

    I am a member of the UNESCO information literacy expert panel, a member of the peer review colleges for the UK Arts and Humanities Research Council and for the UK Economic and Social Research Council, and a project evaluator for the Leverhulme Trust, and the Slovenian National Research Agency.

    I have acted as a consultant for a number of UK and international organisations, including Pfizer, GlaxoSmithKline, Ciba-Geigy, Forensic Science Service, Health Development Agency, National Institute for Health and Clinical Excellence, Taylor and Francis, Clifford Chance, the BBC and News International. I have been a consultant /evaluator for the Open Society Institute’s Library Program and Information Program. This as led to a number of continuing collaborations with international information organisations, and with and academic LIS departments, particularly in Central Europe.

    I have carried out professional development training for a number of organisation, and I currently do so for Aslib, leading courses in information management and inoformation organisation.

    I am editor of Journal of Documentation, the leading European journal of the information science, and on the editorial board of Portal: Libraries and the Academy and of Aslib Proceedings. In the past I have been on the boards of a number of journals, including International Journal of Information Management, Journal of Chemical Information and Computer Sciences, Perspectives in Information Management, and ATLA: Alternatives to Laboratory Animals. I am particular interested, in theory and practice, in how the academic journal is developing in the new environment of digital content and open access.

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