2006 Award of Merit acceptance speech

✍ Scribed by Blaise Cronin

• Publisher: American Society for Information Science and Technology
• Year: 2008
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 267 KB
• Volume: 33
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0095-4403
• DOI: 10.1002/bult.2007.bult1720330308

✦ Synopsis

I bracketed with such lustrous recipients as Hans Peter Luhn and Robert Fairthome from the 6Os, Cynl Cleverdon and Eugene Garfield from the 70s, Wilfrid Lancaster and Gerard Salton from the 80s, Tefko Saracevic and Henry Small from the 90s, and Don Swanson and Howard White from the present decade. I mention these individuals, not because they are somehow more prestigious than other laureates, but because their work in particular, though not exclusively, has shaped my career in myriad ways over the course of the last 30 or so years.

It was as a graduate student in the 70s at the Queen's University of Belfast that I first encountered the doyens of information science. I pored over copies of American Documentation, Aslib Proceedings, IPdiM, ARIST and the Journal of Documentation with the enthusiasm of a kid in a candy store, stumbling upon seminal papers by the aforementioned grandees and others such as Bertram Brookes, Michael Buckland,