John V. Richardson Jr.

Richardson attended Whetstone High School (Columbus, Ohio), received a B.A. in sociology from Ohio State University (1971), an MLS from Peabody College, Vanderbilt University (1972, Beta Phi Mu), and a doctorate from Indiana University (1978). He has said of his educational preparation, "I wanted to do something relevant, then useful, and finally something interesting."

Richardson joined the faculty of the University of California, Los Angeles in 1978 as an assistant professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science. He was promoted to associate professor with tenure in 1983 and to full professor in 1998. In the spring of 1986, he was a consultant on rare books and government documents at the Los Angeles Public Library after their disastrous fire. He offered one of the first for-credit classes on Google in the spring term of 2007. He also has served as associate dean of UCLA's Graduate Division for five years. Richardson was promoted to professor emeritus in February 2013 and served as an adjunct professor at Charles Sturt University in New South Wales, Australia through the 2018 academic year.

Richardson has gained international recognition and garnered multiple awards. In recognition of his significant research contributions in the field of Library and Information Science, Richardson was appointed as the Visiting Distinguished Scholar to the prestigious Office of Research at OCLC, Inc., for the academic year 1996-1997. Richardson is the author of more than a dozen scholarly books and dozens of articles, and for eight years from 1995 to 2003, he served as the editor in chief of the premier journal in librarianship, the Library Quarterly, published by the University of Chicago Press.[1] He has been awarded numerous prizes including the Justin Winsor Prize from the American Library Association and the Best Information Science Book award from the American Society for Information Science and Technology.[2]

Richardson's work has worldwide recognition, and he has studied and lectured in Aberstywyth University, Wales (Beta Phi Mu Scholar); Australia; Eritrea; in the Russian Federation (ALISE Teaching Fellow in Moscow and St. Petersburg) including the Russian Far East (Vladivostok, Khabarovsk, and Sakhalin Island),[3] Tanzania; Turkmenistan; Uganda; and Zambia.[4] He is the recipient of two Fulbright scholarships from the Fulbright Program,[5] and has lectured internationally as a guest of the United States Department of State.

Richardson's published books include:

• Richardson on Reference (forthcoming).
• Understanding Reference Transactions: Transforming an Art into Science (San Diego, CA: Academic Press, 2002) (Matthew L. Saxton, co-author).
• Knowledge-Based Systems in General Reference Work: Applications, Problems, and Progress (New York: Academic Press, 1995).
• The Gospel of Scholarship: Pierce Butler and A Critique of American Librarianship (Metuchen, NJ: Scarecrow Press, 1992).
• The Spirit of Inquiry: The Graduate Library School at Chicago, 1921-1951 (Chicago: American Library Association, 1982).

• WebPage for Professor Richardson at UCLA