John V. Richardson Jr.

Last updated


John Vinson Richardson Jr. is an American professor of information studies at University of California, Los Angeles, with a significant record of research and publications on intelligent question answering systems, reference service, and history of librarianship. His current research focuses on assessment and evaluation issues related to virtual reference (i.e., chat) such as time in queue, service duration, content analysis or microanalysis of questions, as well as user satisfaction. Currently, Richardson also serves as an adjunct professor in the School of Information Studies at Charles Sturt University in NSW, Australia.

Contents

Education

Richardson attended Whetstone High School (Columbus, Ohio), received a B.A. in sociology from Ohio State University (1971), an MLS from Peabody College, Vanderbilt University (1972, Beta Phi Mu), and a doctorate from Indiana University (1978). He has said of his educational preparation, "I wanted to do something relevant, then useful, and finally something interesting."

Career

Before Richardson joined the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles in 1978 as an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, he had interned with Carolyn Hammer of the King Library Press and apprenticed briefly with Richard-Gabriel Rummonds of the Plain Wrapper Press in Vernona, Italy. He was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 1983 and to full professor in 1998. In the spring of 1986, he was a consultant on rare books and government documents at the Los Angeles Public Library after their disastrous fire. He offered one of the first for-credit classes on Google in the spring term of 2007. He also has served as associate dean of UCLA's Graduate Division for five years. Richardson was promoted to professor emeritus in February 2013 and served as an adjunct professor at Charles Sturt University in New South Wales, Australia through the 2018 academic year. Richardson's research interests have focused on the development of intelligent question answering systems, the evaluation of reference services, and the history of librarianship. He has published over 100 articles in academic journals and books, and he is the author or co-author of fifteen books before retirement. More recently, Richardson is a specialist in family history and genealogical research.

Awards

Richardson has gained international recognition and garnered multiple awards. In recognition of his significant research contributions in the field of Library and Information Science, Richardson was appointed as the Visiting Distinguished Scholar to the prestigious Office of Research at OCLC, Inc., for the academic year 1996-1997. Richardson is the author of more than a dozen scholarly books and dozens of articles, and for eight years from 1995 to 2003, he served as the editor in chief of the premier journal in librarianship, the Library Quarterly, published by the University of Chicago Press. [1] He has been awarded numerous prizes including the Justin Winsor Prize from the American Library Association Library History Round Table and the Best Information Science Book award from the American Society for Information Science and Technology. [2] In 2020, the Ohio Genealogical Society recognized his Die Weber Familie (ITA Press) with their William J. and Benjamin S. Harrison Prize for the Best Family History.

Richardson's work has worldwide recognition, and he has studied and lectured in Aberystwyth University, Wales (Beta Phi Mu Scholar); Australia; Eritrea; in the Russian Federation (ALISE Teaching Fellow in Moscow and St. Petersburg) including the Russian Far East (Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, and Sakhalin Island), [3] Tanzania; Turkmenistan; Uganda; and Zambia. [4] He is the recipient of two Fulbright scholarships in 2005 and 2012 from the Fulbright Program, [5] and has lectured internationally as a guest of the United States Department of State.

Published works

Richardson's published books include:

Related Research Articles

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Librarian</span> Profession

A librarian is a person who works professionally in a library providing access to information, and sometimes social or technical programming, or instruction on information literacy to users.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">E. J. Josey</span> African-American librarian

Elonnie J. Josey was an African-American activist and librarian. Josey was the first chair of the Black Caucus of the American Library Association, having been instrumental in its formation in 1970; served as president of the American Library Association from 1984 to 1985; and was the author of over 400 books and other publications.

Wayne August Wiegand is an American library historian, author, and academic. Wiegand retired as F. William Summers Professor of Library and Information Studies and Professor of American Studies at Florida State University in 2010.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Jesse Shera</span> American librarian (1903–1982)

Jesse Hauk Shera was an American librarian and information scientist who pioneered the use of information technology in libraries and played a role in the expansion of its use in other areas throughout the 1950s, 60s, and 70s.

Lee Pierce Butler was a professor at the University of Chicago Graduate Library School. He was one of the first to use the term "library science", by which he meant the scientific study of books and users, and was a leader in the new social-scientific approach to the field in the 1930s and 1940s.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Fred Kilgour</span> American librarian (1914–2006)

Frederick Gridley Kilgour was an American librarian and educator known as the founding director of OCLC, an international computer library network and database. He was its president and executive director from 1967 to 1980.

Education for librarianship, including for paraprofessional library workers, varies around the world, and has changed over time. In recent decades, many institutions offering librarianship education have changed their names to reflect the shift from print media to electronic media, and to information contained outside of traditional libraries. Some call themselves schools of library and information science, or have dropped the word "library" altogether.

The Association of College and Research Libraries (ACRL), a division of the American Library Association, is a professional association of academic librarians and other interested individuals. It is dedicated to enhancing the ability of academic library and information professionals to serve the information needs of the higher education community and to improving learning, teaching, and research. The association serves librarians in all types of academic libraries at the community college, college, and university level and also serves librarians that work in comprehensive and specialized research libraries.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert G. Vosper</span> American educator and librarian

Robert Gordon Vosper was an American educator and librarian who oversaw college libraries at the University of Kansas and the University of California, Los Angeles. Vosper served as president of the American Library Association (ALA) and won the Joseph W. Lippincott award in 1985. He was also named one of the top 100 librarians of the 20th century by American Libraries. He was awarded American Library Association Honorary Membership in 1993.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Robert B. Downs</span> Author and librarian

Robert Bingham Downs was an American writer and librarian. Downs was an advocate for intellectual freedom, and spent the majority of his career working against literary censorship. Downs authored many books and publications regarding the topics of censorship, and on the topics of responsible and efficient leadership in the library context.

Richard W. Ziolkowski is an American electrical engineer and academician, who was the president of the IEEE Antennas and Propagation Society (2005), and a former vice president of this same society (2004). In 2006, he became an OSA Fellow. He is also an IEEE Fellow. He was born on November 22, 1952, in Warsaw, New York.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Philip Altbach</span> American writer

Philip G. Altbach is an American author, researcher and former professor at Boston College, and the founding director of the Boston College Center for International Higher Education.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Frederick Wilfrid Lancaster</span> British-American information scientist (1933–2013)

Frederick Wilfrid ("Wilf") Lancaster was a British-American information scientist. He immigrated to the US in 1959 and worked as information specialist for the National Library of Medicine in Bethesda, Maryland, from 1965 to 1968. He was a professor at the University of Illinois, Urbana, from 1972 to 1992 and professor emeritus from 1992 to 2013. He continued as an honored scholar after retirement speaking on the evolution of librarianship in the 20th and 21st century.

A library and information scientist, also known as a library scholar, is a researcher or academic who specializes in the field of library and information science and often participates in scholarly writing about and related to library and information science. A library and information scientist is neither limited to any one subfield of library and information science nor any one particular type of library. These scientists come from all information-related sectors including library and book history.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Alice G. Smith Lecture</span>

The Alice G. Smith Lecture, established in 1989, is sponsored by the University of South Florida School of Information. The lecture is an annual recognition of a scholar or author whose achievements have been instrumental in the development of librarianship or information studies. The lecture series honors the memory of the School's first director, Alice Gullen Smith, known for her work with youth and bibliotherapy. The Lecture Fund was created with the purpose of memorializing the work of Smith, who was central to the School's first accreditation by the American Library Association in 1975. Florida Library Association archivist, Bernadette Storck has provided an oral history of the development of libraries in Tampa, Florida that details the contributions of Smith including her establishment of the Tampa Book Fair that encouraged thousands of children to foster a love for books and reading

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Kathleen de la Peña McCook</span> American librarian

Kathleen de la Peña McCook is a library scholar and librarian. Much of her work centers around human rights, First Amendment issues, and the freedom of information.

Sidney E. Berger is an American educator, librarian, and scholar who has worked and published extensively in literature, librarianship, and bibliography and the book arts, with a primary focus on papermaking, paper history, watermarks, and paper decoration.

Beverly P. Lynch is an American scholar, professor, librarian, and administrator. She was president of the American Library Association from 1985 to 1986.

<span class="mw-page-title-main">Mary Niles Maack</span> American librarian and scholar (1945–2023)

Mary Niles Maack was an American librarian and scholar known for her work on comparative librarianship and the history of the book.

Linda C. Smith is professor emerita at the University of Illinois School of Information Sciences. She has served as President of the Association for Information Science and Technology and the Association for Library and Information Science Education. Her scholarship has been wide-ranging and she is particularly known for her research on the potential of information systems to support discovery and consideration of convergence curation. The first librarian to investigate Artificial Intelligence (AI) for Information Retrieval (IR), Smith also specified the role of AI as a human intermediary and identified the AI techniques of pattern recognition, representation, problem-solving, and learning as suitable for IR. AI is just like a human librarian who helps users navigate information systems.

References

  1. ↑ "Richardson's Work on the GLS and Pierce Butler". polaris.gseis.ucla.edu. Archived from the original on 2007-03-12.
  2. ↑ "Best Information Science Book Award Recipients".
  3. ↑ http://eng.vvsu.ru/ Vladivostok State University of Economics and Service, website
  4. ↑ "Professor studies spread of information in Turkmenistan," Daily Bruin, Nov. 9, 2012.
  5. ↑ "Senior Fulbright Scholar Visits Turkmenistan, UCLA Ampersand, Oct. 22, 2012.
This page is based on this Wikipedia article
Text is available under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license; additional terms may apply.
Images, videos and audio are available under their respective licenses.