Carol Tenopir

Carol Tenopir | Credit University of Tennessee at Knoxville

Carol Tenopir is an American information scientist. Her research focuses on information access and retrieval, electronic publishing, scholarly communication and the information industry.

Life

Carol Tenopir was born in Whittier, California in 1952. She received a B.A. with majors in English and History from Whittier College in 1974. Tenopir received her Master of Library Science in 1976 from California State University, Fullerton.[1]

Contributions

Tenopir began work for an information consulting firm in southern California before becoming an automation librarian for the University of Hawai'i at Mānoa in 1976. During this time, she began writing the "Online Databases" column for Library Journal, which she continued for 28 years. She received her PhD in Library and Information Sciences from the University of Illinois at Champaign-Urbana in 1984. Then, Tenopir was rehired by the University of Hawai'i as an Assistant Professor in the School of Library and Information Science. She began teaching distance courses via television to satellite campuses of the university.

Tenopir was a professor at the University of Tennessee - Knoxville from 1994 until 2021 when she retired. At UTK, Tenopir taught courses such as Electronic Reference Services, Advanced Online Information Services, Indexing and Abstracting, and the Information Industry. Tenopir has published five books, and her collaborative research on academic journal reading habits was covered by Nature in 2014.[2] She was named a Chancellor's Professor in 2008. Tenopir visited Finland as a three-time Fulbright Scholar; first as a short-term Fulbright Specialist in 2005 at the University of Oulu, then ten years later, again on a short specialist visit, to Tampere University in 2015, and then for a full year during 2016-17 as Fulbright-Nokia Distinguished Chair in Information and Communications Technologies at Hanken School of Economics. She was first woman to receive the latter award.

Tenopir received a grant from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to create the National Science Digital Library (NSDL) in 2001, designed to make available high-quality teaching materials in science, technology, engineering, and math. She has received three awards from ASIS&T including the Award of Merit, and in 2012 was named an AAAS Fellow.

In 2024, scienceOS, an AI research agent for scientists developed in Germany, released the Tenopir Update which allows users to add PDFs in their chat with the AI. The update is dedicated to Tenopir in honor of her work in understanding the academic role and use of electronic resources and digital information.[3]

Publications

• Tenopir, Carol & Donald W. King. (2003). Communication Patterns of Engineers. IEEE.[4]

• Agarwal, Naresh. (2022). "Carol Tenopir, in conversation". Project Oneness World.[5]
• Price, Gary. (2021). "On Carol Tenopir’s “Legacy of Distance Learning” in the University of Tennessee’s School of Information Sciences". Infodocket.[6]
• Tenopir, Carol. (2021). "A Legacy of Learning in the School of Information Sciences". Against the Grain.[7]
• Tenopir, Carol, Lisa Christian & Jordan Kaufman. (2019). "Seeking, Reading, and Use of Scholarly Articles: An International Study of Perceptions and Behavior of Researchers." Publications 7(1): article 18. https://doi.org/10.3390/publications7010018
• Tenopir, C., King, D.W., Christian, L. and Volentine, R. (2015). "Scholarly article seeking, reading, and use: a continuing evolution from print to electronic in the sciences and social sciences". Learned Publishing 28: 93-105. https://doi.org/10.1087/20150203
• AAAS Staff. (2012). "AAAS Members Elected as Fellows". AAAS.org.[8]
• Tenopir, Carol. (2009). "ASIS&T 2009 award of merit speech: Facilitating and enhancing scientific discovery". Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 36(2): 30-31. https://doi.org/10.1002/bult.2010.1720360210
• Tenopir, Carol. (1990). Issues in Online Database Searching. Libraries Unlimited.
• Tenopir, Carol and Gerald Lundeen. (1988). Managing Your Information: How to Design & Create a Textual Database on Your Microcomputer. Neal-Schuman.

Awards

• American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS) Fellow, 2012
• ASIST Award of Merit, 2009
• Miles Conrad Award Lecture, at the National Federation of Advanced Information Scientists 2006 annual meeting
• ASIST Research Award, 2002
• Award for Teaching Excellence, Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE), 2000
• Steven L. Goldspiel Research Grant, Special Libraries Association (SLA), 1995
• American Society for Information Science (ASIS) Outstanding Information Science Teacher Award, 1993

Further Reading

• "Carol Tenopir". Wikipedia. 2026.[9]
• "Carol Tenopir - ORCID". 2025.[10]
• "Tenopir Update - Release Notes (March 19, 2024)". scienceOS. https://www.scienceos.ai/changelog/tenopir-update/
• Gairn, Louisa. (2023). "Paying it Forward". Fulbright Finland News Magazine.[11]
• "Alumna Receives Fulbright-Nokia Chair". (2016). Whittier College.[12]
• "Fulbright Scholar Directory". Fulbright Scholar Program.[13]
• Van Noorden, R. (2014). "Scientists may be reaching a peak in reading habits." Nature. https://doi.org/10.1038/nature.2014.14658
• Rogers, M. (2001). "NSF Awards Tenopir $252K". Library Journal 126(19): 17. doi:10.1300/j118v19n03_04
• Townsel‐Winston, Melinda. (1993). "An Interview with Carol Tenopir". OCLC Systems & Services: International digital library perspectives, 9 (4): 18–20, doi: https://doi.org/10.1108/eb056001