Joseph T. Tennis

Joseph T. Tennis is a Professor at the Information School of the University of Washington, Adjunct Professor of Linguistics, and a member of the Textual Studies faculty at UW.  He was the President of the International Society for Knowledge Organization (2014-2018).  He is an Associate Member of the Peter Wall Institute for Advanced Study at The University of British Columbia.  He has been an occasional visiting scholar at the State University of São Paulo since 2009.

He is the Managing Editor for Advances in Classification Research Online, and on the editorial board for Library Quarterly (USA), Knowledge Organization (Germany), Scire: Representación y Organización del Conocimiento (Spain), Informatio (Uruguay), and Zagadnienia Informacji Naukowej (Poland).  He is also a member of the Dublin Core Usage Board and Oversight Committee (an international standards body that works toward the implementation and maintenance of interoperable metadata). He has been active in the InterPARES research project (working on digital records preservation) since 2005, and currently serves as an advisor and researcher on metadata issues. 

His research has been funded by Microsoft, IMLS, and SSHRC.  He holds a B.A. in Religious Studies from Lawrence University.  He received his M.L.S. from Indiana University and an Sp.L.I.S. in Book History, and the Ph.D. in Information Science from the University of Washington.  He works in classification theory, the ethics and aesthetics of information organization labor, the versioning of classification schemes and thesauri, subject ontogeny, information provenance, authenticity metadata, and the comparative discursive analysis of metadata creation and evaluation, including archival metadata, both contemporary and historical.

With Elliott Hauser he won best paper at the 2019 NASKO Symposium, in 2017 he gave the Sarada Ranganathan Endowment Lectures / Ranganathan Memorial Lectures. 2013 he won the ALISE/Bohdan S. Wynar Research Paper Award, for "The Strange Case of Eugenics: A Subject’s Ontogeny in a Long-Lived Classification Scheme and the Question of Collocative Integrity. " (2012). In Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 63(7): 1350-1359.

To find out more about Joseph visit: http://ischool.uw.edu/people/faculty/jtennis