Professor Jonathan Furner, a scholar of the history and philosophy of cultural stewardship, has assumed the post of chair of information studies at the UCLA Graduate School of Education & Information Studies (GSE&IS).
Furner teaches classes on the representation and organization of archival records, library materials and other cultural artifacts. An author of more than 50 scholarly papers in the field’s leading journals, Furner frequently uses conceptual analysis to evaluate the theoretical frameworks, data models and metadata standards on which information access systems rely. He chairs the Association for Information Science and Technology’s special interest group on classification research and the Dewey Decimal Classification’s editorial policy committee. He is associate editor of the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, co-editor of a book series for MIT Press and Facet (UK) and a regular reviewer of contributions to journals and conferences in the fields of philosophy of information, knowledge organization and bibliometrics.
“Jonathan Furner is a scholar’s scholar,” said GSE&IS Dean Marcelo Suárez-Orozco. “He is a deep thinker, a prolific writer, and a marvelous university citizen. I am personally gratified that I will be working closely with Jonathan to take UCLA’s Department of Information Studies to the next level of excellence, service, and dedication to the the principles of social justice in this defining domain for our country moving forward: information in the service of citizenship and democracy."
Furner is a faculty affiliate of UCLA’s Center for Digital Humanities, and he previously led UCLA’s Moving Image Archive Studies program. He earned his master’s degree in philosophy and social theory at the University of Cambridge in 1990, and his Ph.D. in information studies at the University of Sheffield in 1994.
This story was originally published in the GSE&IS news magazine, Ampersand.
