School of Information, U.C. Berkeley
Formerly School of Library & Information Studies

Michael Buckland
Emeritus Professor, School of Information and Co-Director, Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720-4600, USA.

Michael Buckland grew up in England and studied history at Oxford and librarianship at Sheffield University. He trained at the Bodleian Library in Oxford and moved to the University of Lancaster Library in 1965. From 1967 to 1972 he worked on a series of studies of book usage, book availability, and library management games. His doctoral dissertation was published as Book Availability and the Library User (Pergamon, 1975).

In 1972 Buckland moved to the United States to be Assistant Director of Libraries for Technical Services at Purdue University Libraries before becoming Dean of the School of Library and Information Studies at Berkeley from 1976 to 1984. He served from 1983 to 1987 as Assistant Vice President for Library Plans and Policies for the nine campuses of the University of California. He has been a visiting professor in Austria, Australia, Norway, and Sweden and was President of the American Society for Information Science in 1998. In 2004 Buckland became Emeritus Professor and has remained active in research, writing, and since 2000 as Co-Director of the Electronic Cultural Atlas Initiative.

Professor Buckland's interests include bibliography, library services, search and discovery, cultural heritage, and the history and theory of documentation. He worked with Fredric Gey and Ray Larson on ways to make bibliographical searching easier and more effective through search support for unfamiliar metadata vocabularies and improved geographical search. Later work with Ryan Shaw and Patrick Golden on “Editorial Practices and the Web” developed a platform to support and make openly accessible the research notes of editors preparing scholarly editions of historically important texts.

His writings include Emanuel Goldberg and his Knowledge Machine, a biography (Libraries Unlimited, 2006), Library Services in Theory and Context (Pergamon, 1983; 2nd ed. 1988), Information and Information Systems (Praeger, 1991), Redesigning Library Services (American Library Association, 1992), Information in Society (MIT Press, 2017), and, with Masaya Takayama, Ideology and Libraries: California, Diplomacy and Occupied Japan, 1945-1952 (Rowman and Littlefield, 2021).

More at http://people.ischool.berkeley.edu/~buckland/.