Rayward shares expertise on Otlet

Rayward interview

Professor Emeritus W. Boyd Rayward was recently interviewed in Mons, Belgium, at a meeting of scholars involved in the HyperOtlet research project. This multi and transdisciplinary project is focused on Le Traité de documentation, a major book in the history of information sciences that was written in 1934 by Paul Otlet, a Belgian lawyer, bibliographer, internationalist, and pacifist whose ideas foreshadowed current digital and other technologies such as the Internet, hypertext, and Wikipedia.

The goal of HyperOtlet is "to study the articulation between documentation technologies and modes of knowledge organization, presentation, and visualization." Collaborators on the project include the Ecole Nationale Supérieure des Sciences d’Information et des Bibliothèques in Lyon; the laboratory, Médiations, Informations, Communications, Arts of the Université Bordeaux Montaigne; the Maison des Sciences de l’Homme in Paris; and The Mundaneum,  the Archive Centre of the Wallonia-Brussels Fédération, in Mons. HyperOtlet is supported by the French Centre de Recherche Scientifique.

Rayward, a historian of information science and the scholar who brought attention to the life and work of Otlet, also serves as a member of the Scientific Committee of a symposium to mark the culmination of HyperOtlet. The symposium will be held in March 2021 in Paris.

Rayward is an emeritus professor in the iSchool at Illinois and the School of Information Systems, Technology and Management of the University of New South Wales. He earned a PhD from the University of Chicago and an MS in library science from the University of Illinois. During his career, he has held professorial and deanship positions; has served as editor for Library Quarterly, Library Trends, and special issues of several journals; and was awarded the 2004 American Society for Information Science and Technology Research Award.

Research Areas:
Updated on
Backto the news archive

Related News

McDowell to present keynote on data storytelling

Associate Professor Kate McDowell will present the closing keynote of the Measures of Success Educator Impact Series at Western Michigan University (WMU) on March 21. The virtual series, which is sponsored by the WMUx Office of Faculty Development, focuses on equity and educator impact.

Kate McDowell

Dahlen selected as judge for National Book Awards

Associate Professor Sarah Park Dahlen has been selected by the National Book Foundation to serve as a judge for the 74th National Book Awards. The foundation chose 25 judges for this year's awards, which are given in the categories of fiction, nonfiction, poetry, translated literature, and young people’s literature.

Sarah Park Dahlen

Downie to present keynote at CHIIR 2023

Professor and Associate Dean For Research J. Stephen Downie will be the keynote speaker for the 2023 ACM SIGIR Conference on Human Information Interaction and Retrieval (CHIIR 2023), which will be held on March 19-23 in Austin, Texas. In addition to information interaction and retrieval, the multidisciplinary conference explores topics such as human-human information interaction, novel interaction paradigms, new evaluation methods, and related research from various fields.

Stephen Downie

Lawrence Auld, former faculty member, passes away

Lawrence W.S. Auld (PhD '75) passed away on March 2, 2023. He returned to school to earn a PhD in library and information science from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign and served on the faculty at UIUC and then at East Carolina University until his retirement in 2003.

Lawrence Auld

Postdoctoral Research Associate Program prepares future faculty

In the 2021-2022 academic year, the iSchool launched its Postdoctoral Research Associate Program. The goal of this program is to prepare candidates for tenure-track assistant professor or other appointments inside and outside of academia. The cohort has grown to five postdocs, and applications are currently being accepted for the 2023-2024 academic year.