Michael Buckland

Michael Buckland (born 1941) is an information scientist and emeritus professor at the UC Berkeley School of Information. He makes significant contributions to the history of information science and documentation, theoretical foundations of information, library services, and bibliography. In addition to the ASIS&T Award of Merit (2012), Buckland received the "Best JASIST Paper Overall" Award (2017) for "Information as Thing," published in 1991.

Life

Michael Keeble Buckland was born on November 23, 1941 in Wantage and raised in London, Staffordshire, and Stoke-on-Trent, England. After studying history at the University of Oxford, he began his library career as a trainee at the Bodleian Library. He received his professional qualification in librarianship from the University of Sheffield in 1965 and joined the staff of the University of Lancaster Library the same year, one year after the university was founded. From 1967 to 1972, he was responsible for the University of Lancaster Library Research Unit, where a series of studies were conducted on book usage, book availability, and library management simulations.[1]

In 1972, Buckland received his Ph.D. from the University of Sheffield. His doctoral dissertation, Library Stock Control, was later published as Book Availability and the Library User (Pergamon, 1975).

Contributions

In 1972, Buckland moved to the United States to Purdue University Libraries, where he was assistant director of libraries for technical services. In 1976, he joined the former School of Librarianship at UC Berkeley as Dean and served in the role until 1984. During his service, he oversaw the school’s transition to the School of Library and Information Studies. From 1983 to 1987, he served as assistant vice president for library plans and policies for the nine campuses of the University of California. In 1988, he returned to the school as a professor. At Berkeley his courses taught included Indexing and Vocabulary, Concepts of Information Management, Classification and Bibliographical Representation, Design of Library Services, and Access to American Cultural Heritages. From 1991 to 2025, he co-hosted his Information Access Seminar series with Clifford Lynch every Friday afternoon. He became emeritus professor in 2004 and has been a visiting professor in Austria, Australia and Sweden. Since 2000 he serves as co-director of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative.

Buckland is one of the most heavily cited authors in library and information science, and his scholarship spans over 50 years. Among his most influential contributions to information science is his reconceptualization of information itself, published in his seminal 1991 paper "Information as Thing". Closely related is his 1997 paper, "What is a Document?", which draws on the work of Suzanne Briet and expands the concept of documents beyond traditional textual materials. His publications, including five books, highlight the influence of pioneers, including Suzanne Briet, Emanuel Goldberg, Lodewyk Bendikson, and Robert Pagès, drawing renewed attention to European documentation traditions.

Recognized as a leading figure in Neo-Documentation, Buckland is a frequent presenter at the Document Academy (where in 2025 he presented on this very project, the Biographical Dictionary of Documentation and Information). His work has been funded by the A.W. Mellon and Coleman Fung foundations, the National Science Foundation, the Institute for Museum and Library Services, and the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency to advance Information Science research.

Principal Investigator (with Christos Faloutos, Tina Eliassi-Rad, Tim Tangherlini, & Lewis Lancaster), "EAGER: Network Pattern Recognition Project," funded by the NSF (award IIS-0970179), 2010 - 2011
Principal Investigator (with Fredric Gey and Daniel Melia), "Context and Relationships: Ireland and Irish Studies," funded by the NEH and IMLS (award PK-50027-07), Oct 2007 - Dec 2010.
Principal Investigator (with Fredric Gey and Ray R. Larson), "Support for the Learner: What, Where, When, and Who," funded by the IMLS (award LG-02-04-0041-04), Oct 2004 - Sept 2006.
Principal Investigator (with Fredric Gey and Ray R. Larson), "Going Places in the Catalog: Improved Geographic Access," funded by the IMLS (award LG-02-02-0035-02), Oct 2002 - Sept 2004
Principal Investigator, "Search Support for Unfamiliar Metadata Vocabularies," funded by DARPA (award N66001-97-C-8541), 1997-2001
Principal Investigator, "Seamless Searching of Numeric and Textual Resources," funded by the IMLS (award 178), 1999-2002

Publications

Library Services in Theory and Context (Pergamon, 1983; 2nd ed. 1988, ISBN 0-08-035754-7)

Information and Information Systems (Praeger, 1991, ISBN 0-275-93851-4)

"Information as thing", Journal of the American Society for Information Science 42, no. 5 (June 1991): 351-360.

Redesigning Library Services (American Library Association, 1992, ISBN 0-8389-0590-0)

"What is a “document”?," Journal of the American Society for Information Science 48, no. 9 (1997): 804-809.

Emanuel Goldberg and his Knowledge machine (Libraries Unlimited, 2006, ISBN 0-313-31332-6)

Lund, Niels Windfeld & Buckland, Michael (2008). "Document, documentation, and the Document Academy: Introduction". Archival Science 8 (3): 161–164. doi:10.1007/s10502-009-9076-3.

"What kind of science can information science be?," Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 63, no. 1 (2012): 1-7, https://doi.org/10.1002/asi.21656

Information and Society (MIT Press, 2017, ISBN 978-0-262-53338-6)

Ideology and Libraries: California, Diplomacy, and Occupied Japan, 1945-1952 (Rowman & Littlefield, 2021, ISBN 978-1-5381-4314-8)

Awards

Emeritus of the Year Award, UC Berkeley, 2024
Tim Gorichanaz, Ronald E. Day, & Kiersten F. Latham (Eds.) (2024) Festschrift for Michael Buckland in Journal of Documentation 80 (3), https://www.emerald.com/jd/issue/80/3
California Library Hall of Fame, California Library Association, 2021
Best Information Science Book Award, 2018 for Information and Society
Best JASIST Paper of the Decades (1990s & Overall), 2017 for "Information as Thing"
Best JASIST Paper of the Decades (2010s), 2017 for "What Kind of Science Can Information Science Be?"
Distinguished Lectureship Award, New Jersey ASIST Chapter, 2015
Frederick G. Kilgour Award for Research in Library and Information Technology, ALA LITA and OCLC, 2014
ASIST Award of Merit, 2012
President of ASIS, 1998
Fulbright Research Scholar to Graz University of Technology in Austria, 1989

Life

Contributions

Publications

Awards

Further Reading