I am a Professor of Information Science, formerly at the Department of Library and Information Science at City, University of London. Presently Honorary Professor and PhD supervisor at University College London and the University of Ljubljana.
My interests in information science and documentation include theories and philosophies of information, information behaviour and digital literacy – in particular information for creativity and for the development of understanding – and aspects of knowledge organisation and of information history. See my academic and professional page for more details.
I am editor of Journal of Documentation, the leading European journal of library/information science, editorial board member for Knjižnica, and for MDPI’s open access journal Information and open post-publication peer-review journal Sci, co-author of Facet’s best-selling textbook Introduction to Information Science (second edition, 2022) and of the open access monograph Open Access in Theory and Practice (Routledge, 2020), and a member of the international advisory board for the Conceptions of Library and Information Science (CoLIS) conferences.
My blog is used mainly for short and informal comments on topics within my academic interests, with a few pieces on London; the blog category list will give an indication of what to expect. Posting is occasional, rather than regular or frequent, as befits the title.
Some recent publications
D Bawden and L Robinson. A voice out of the dark of time; the once and future LIS discipline. [Knowledge Commons, November 2025]
Dark matter and information revisited [blog post, August 2025]
Entropy. How little we (still) know [blog post, March 2025]
D. Bawden and L. Robinson. Achieving global open access. Book review. Knjižnica: revija za področje bibliotekarstva in informacijske znanosti, 2025, 69(1), 77-82.
Japanese translation of Introduction to Information Science (2nd edn.) [November 2024]
“A truly inherent property”: information in genetics [blog post, September 2024]
D Bawden and L Robinson. Open Science roles for libraries; international perspectives and examples. Knjižnica: revija za področje bibliotekarstva in informacijske znanosti, 2024, 68(2-3), 67-85.
S Dodd and D Bawden, Stories Not Statistics: A Qualitative Narrative Exploration of the Value of Public Libraries in the United Kingdom. The Library Quarterly, 2024, 94(2), 159-179.
Foreword to Introduction to Documentation Studies, N.W. Lund, Facet, 2024, pp xvii-xix
T Mason and D Bawden, Times New Plural – The multiple temporalities of contemporary life and the infosphere Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, 2023, 74(10), 1159-1169. [shortlisted for JASIST Best Paper 2024] Translation in Information Matters.
The Occasional Informationist 