Marcia Bates

Marcia J. Bates (born 1942) is a Professor Emerita of information studies at the UCLA School of Education and Information Studies. She is widely published in the field of information science and focuses much of her research on information retrieval systems and information seeking behavior. In addition to the ASIS&T Award of Merit (2005), Bates received the Best JASIS Paper Award (1980, 2000).

Photo Available @ https://pages.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/bates/

Life

Marcia Jeanne Bates was born in Terre Haute, Indiana, USA in 1942. She moved frequently during her childhood and completed high school in Lafayette, California.[1] After receiving a B.A. (Phi Beta Kappa) at Pomona College (Claremont, California), Bates was a Peace Corps volunteer teaching English as a Foreign Language in Thailand for two years. She then studied librarianship at the University of California, Berkeley where she received an MLS in 1967 and a PhD in 1972.

Contributions

Bates joined the faculty of the University of Maryland (1972-1976), and then the University of Washington (1976-1981), where she received tenure. In 1981 she accepted a promotion at the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), where she taught until 2004. Bates has also been a professional consultant to numerous organizations (including the Library of Congress, Council on Library and Information Resources, and American Chemical Society) in government, foundations, businesses, and technology start-ups.

Bates' early work dealt with searching success and failure in library catalogs, and her articles on information search tactics, that is, techniques and heuristics for improving retrieval success in information systems, gained traction in the field. In conjunction with the Getty Research Institute and other Getty agencies, Bates studied humanities information seeking online, producing six articles. In the area of subject access she designed and argued for a "cluster thesaurus" that would bring together all the syntactic and semantic variants of a concept under each concept, in 1985. Bates argues for an evolutionary approach to the development of human and animal information and knowledge.[2] Many of Bates' subsequent contributions have been in the area of user-centered information system design; articles on her concepts of "berrypicking," "information search tactics," and the "cascade of interactions" in the user-system interface have been widely cited and used. In 2016, Bates collected forty of her previously published articles and published three volumes called Selected Works of Marcia J. Bates (2017 ASIST Webinar).

Dr. Bates was Editor-in-Chief of the seven-volume Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences, 3rd Ed., with Mary Niles Maack, Associate Editor. In addition to library and information science, the encyclopedia covers archival science, museum studies, informatics, records management, knowledge management, and bibliography, as well as cognate disciplines, such as communication studies, decision sciences, epistemology, rhetoric, semiotics, and technical writing.

Impact

Researchers White and McCain (1998) included Bates in their list of top 21 prominent information scientists, as well as a canonical author in the time range of 1972 - 1995. According to Google Scholar, Bates' work has been cited over 14,000 times.[3] Cronin & Meho (2006) found that she ranked 3rd in a list of 31 influential information scientists. Zhao and Strotmann (2008) awarded Bates the ranking of one of the 15 most active and influential authors in the time range of 1996-2005.

Publications

• Hartel, J. & & Bates, M. (2018). Marcia J. Bates: Past -- >Present -- >Future. Proceedings of the 2017 Conference of CAIS. https://doi.org/10.29173/cais1055
• Encyclopedia of Library and Information Sciences, 3rd edition (Taylor & Francis, 2010)
• Bates, M.J. (2008). Hjørland's critique of bates' work on defining information. JASIST 59 (5): 842-844. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.20796
• Bates, M.J. (2006). Fundamental forms of information. JASIST 57 (8): 1033-1045. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.20369
• Bates, Marcia J. (May 2005). The cascade of interactions in the digital library interface. Information Processing & Management 38 (3): 381–400. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0306-4573(01)00041-3
• Bates, M.J. (1999). The invisible substrate of information science. JASIS 50 (12): 1043-1050. https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(1999)50:12<1043::AID-ASI1>3.0.CO;2-X
• Bates, M.J. (1999). The 50th Anniversary of the Journal of the American Society for Information Science: Guest editor introduction. Journal of the American Society for Information Science 50 (11): 958–964. https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(1999)50:11%3C960::AID-ASI1%3E3.0.CO;2-K
• Bates, M.J. (1999, July 15). Another information system fails—why? OpEd article. Los Angeles Times, B9.
• Bates, Marcia J. (1990). Where should the person stop and the information search interface start?. Information Processing & Management 26 (5): 575–591. https://doi.org/10.1016/0306-4573(90)90103-9
• Bates, Marcia J. (1989). The design of browsing and berrypicking techniques for the online search interface. Online Review 13 (5): 407–424. https://doi.org/10.1108/eb024320
• Bates, M.J. (1986). Subject access in online catalogs: A design model. JASIS 37 (6): 357-376. https://doi.org/10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(198611)37:6<357::AID-ASI1>3.0.CO;2-H
• Bates, Marcia J. (July 1979). Information search tactics. Journal of the American Society for Information Science 30 (4): 205–214. https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.4630300406

Awards

• ASIST Award of Merit, 2005
• SIG USE Academy of Fellows, ASIS&T, 2005
• Frederick G. Kilgour Award for Research in Library and Information Technology, ALA LITA, 2001
• Best Journal of ASIS Paper Award, 2000 for "The invisible substrate of information science" in JASIS 50(12)
• ASIST Research in Information Science Award, 1998
• American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS - Information, Computing, and Communication) Fellow, 1990
• Best Journal of ASIS Paper Award, 1980 for "Information search tactics" in JASIS 30(4)

Papers

• The "Marcia J. Bates papers, 1963-2019" are housed at the University of Washington Libraries: https://archiveswest.orbiscascade.org/ark:/80444/xv996637

Further Reading

• "Marcia J. Bates". Wikipedia. 2026.[4]
• Arango, Jorge. "Marcia Bates on Search Systems". TheInformed.Life. 2023-01-01.[5]
• "Marcia J. Bates Home Page". pages.gseis.ucla.edu. 2022.[6]
• "Everything you need to know about Information Science." INFIDEOS YouTube. 2021-06-26.[7]
• Ivanov, A. O. (2018). Bridging the Gap: The Concept of Information in the Work of Marcia J. Bates and Birger Hjørland. In Proceedings of the Annual Conference of CAIS Actes Du congrès Annuel De l’ACSI. https://doi.org/10.29173/cais999
• "Bates-orama ISIC Workshop and Syllabus". jennahartel.info. 2017.[8]
• Hartel, J. "Castles and inverted castles: the work of Marcia J. Bates". Information Research 18 (3): paper C31. https://informationr.net/ir/18-3/colis/paperC31.html
• Hartel, J. "Message #4: Newsflash - Bates and Hjørland Debate". jennahartel.info. 2011-04-09.[9]
• Horrocks, N. "Optimism, Attendance Up at ASIS&T". Library Journal. 2010-05-21.[10]