Associate Professor Kathryn La Barre has been elected to the Board of Directors of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T). Her three-year term as a director-at-large will begin in 2016.
ASIS&T is a professional organization that seeks to discover new theories, practices, and tools to improve information access. Founded in 1937, today the group boasts an international membership representing fifty countries. Publications of the association include the Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology, Bulletin of the Association for Information Science and Technology, and Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST).
La Barre is an expert in contemporary and historical knowledge organization and access systems. Her areas of focus include task analysis, facet analysis, faceted classification, and concept theory. Her research has been published in ARIST; Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology; Library Trends; Knowledge Organization; Libraries and the Cultural Record; and Cataloging and Classification Quarterly. She serves on the editorial boards of several key journals in the field.
An active, long-standing member of ASIS&T, La Barre has held multiple leadership roles since joining the association in 1998 as a master’s student, including terms as chair of SIGs/History and Foundations (HFIS) and Classification Research (CR); as SIG cabinet director; 75th Anniversary Task Force member; and as presenter at the Annual Meeting.
At GSLIS, La Barre teaches courses in information organization and access. She is co-principal investigator of the Comic Book Readership Archive (CoBRA) project to build a digital archive of materials related to comic book readership and fandom. She holds MLS and PhD degrees from Indiana University.