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California Library Hall of Fame

 Michael Buckland 

Click on Michael's picture to watch his acceptance speech

Michael Buckland was born and grew-up in England, where he entered library work as a trainee at the University of Oxford’s Bodleian Library. His professional qualification in librarianship and PhD are from Sheffield University. Before moving to the U.S. in 1972, he worked for seven years at the Lancaster University Library. Buckland was assistant director of libraries for technical services at Purdue University from 1972 until 1976, when he became dean of the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of California, Berkeley (1976-1987). From 1983 to 1987, he served as assistant vice president for library plans and policies for the University of California’s nine campuses. He has been a visiting professor in Austria and in Australia. Perhaps his most profound contribution to the library profession is his thought-provoking article “Information as Thing,” a standard title on many library school reading lists since its publication in 1991. The article posits three meanings of information—information-as-process, information-as-knowledge, and information-as-thing (e.g., data, text, documents, objects, and events, that are regarded as being informative)—and has been cited in other articles more than 2200 times. Although he is now retired, Buckland remains an active emeritus professor of information, regularly teaching at UC Berkeley. He is also co-director of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative, a global consortium of universities, research institutions, and libraries that created one of the first web-based interactive mapping sites for the use of humanities research. His recent book, INFORMATION AND SOCIETY (MIT Press, 2017), received the American Society of Information Science and Technology’s 2018 Best Information Science Book of the Year award.

Michael Buckland was inducted into the California Library Hall of Fame in 2021. For more information, please see:

“Michael Buckland,” Wikipedia, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Buckland

Michael K. Buckland (June 1991), “Information as Thing.”  Journal of the American Society for Information Science, pp. 351-360. https://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~buckland/thing.html

“Michael Buckland, Professor Emeritus,”  Berkeley School of Information, https://www.ischool.berkeley.edu/people/michael-buckland.

Photo credit: Sabine Roux