Introducing
John M. Unsworth as Dean
John M. Unsworth became dean of the University of
Illinois Graduate School of Library and Information Science on August 16, 2003.
Unsworth
succeeds Linda C. Smith, who has served as interim dean
since August 2001, when Leigh Estabrook, the dean for 15 years, returned to the
GSLIS
faculty.
Unsworth came to Illinois from the University of
Virginia, where he spent ten years as associate professor in the Department of
English and
founding director of the Institute for Advanced
Technology in the Humanities (IATH), whose goal is "to explore and expand
the potential of
information technology as a tool for humanities
research." Under his leadership, IATH tripled the number of staff members
to nine, quadrupled its
budget, and increased the number of fellows from two
to 40.
Even the location of the IATH offices—in the
west wing of Virginia's Alderman Library—proved auspicious, because his
work in humanities
computing paralleled the work typically done within
library and information science. But Virginia doesn't have a library school, so
it was IATH
that allowed him to focus his research in areas that
are at the core of library science: information management, knowledge
representation, and the long-term preservation of "born digital"
data.
Unsworth is a frequent invited speaker on topics
related to digital scholarship, digital libraries, and scholarly publishing,
including presentations at the 2002 American Library Association Conference in
Atlanta and an April 2002 symposium convened by the Council on Library and
Information Resources.
Unsworth is currently the president of the Association
for Computers and the Humanities and the chairman of the board of the Text
Encoding Initiative Consortium. He is also co-founder, editor emeritus, and
member of the editorial board of Postmodern Culture, the Internet's oldest
peer-reviewed journal in the humanities, which is now published by Johns
Hopkins University Press.
He earned his doctoral degree in English at Virginia
in 1988, his master's in English at Boston University in 1982, and his
bachelor's from Amherst College—also in English and magna cum
laude—in 1981.
www.lis.uiuc.edu
| gslis@uiuc.edu
Last Modified: 5 /
11 / 2008
The Graduate School of Library and
Information Science
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
501 E. Daniel Street, MC-493, Champaign, IL 61820-6211 USA
Home page: © http://www.lis.uiuc.edu/news/archive/unsworth.html
Academic year 2008/2009
© a.r.e.a./Dr.Vicente Forés
López
© Diana Descalzo Conde
diades@alumni.uv.es
Universitat de València Press