Mark Hepworth: in memoriam

Pages258-260
Date15 May 2017
DOIhttps://doi.org/10.1108/AJIM-04-2017-0095
Published date15 May 2017
AuthorThomas Jackson,Peter Willett
Subject MatterLibrary & information science,Information behaviour & retrieval,Information & knowledge management,Information management & governance,Information management
Mark Hepworth: in memoriam
Thomas Jackson
School of Business and Economics, Loughborough University,
Loughborough, UK, and
Peter Willett
Information School, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK
Abstract
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to honour the contributions of Mark Hepworth to library and
information science (LIS).
Design/methodology/approach The personal views of the two authors, both of whom knew Hepworth
for many years.
Findings The significance of Hepworths research in LIS, in particular to studies of information behaviour
and information literacy.
Originality/value Demonstrates the communitys appreciation of Hepworthscontributions to the discipline.
Keywords Editorial, Information literacy, Information behaviour, Information experience,
Mark Hepworth, Library and information science teaching and research
Paper type Viewpoint
This special issue of the journal honours Mark Hepworth, Emeritus Professor at Loughborough
University, who for many years pushed forward the boundaries in studies of peoples
information behaviour and their information experience, and who died on 21 December 2016.
Mark was born in Uganda on the 13 April 1955 and finished school at the
Waterford Kamhlaba School in Swaziland. He later moved back to the UK where he studied
social anthropology and African history at the School of Oriental and African Studies,
University of London. In 1981, he visited a United Nations documentation centre run by his
father in Java, and came across Wilson and Streatfields much-cited article about the
information needs of social workers (Wilson and Streatfield, 1977). This had echoes of social
anthropology, in that it focussed on a community, but concentrated on their information
experience and possible solutions to the problems that they faced. This inspired Mark to
study for an MSc in information studies at the University of Sheffield (where Wilson was by
then the Head of Department), and set the tone for his subsequent career, initially in
industry and then in academia. The former included running Datasolve Limiteds customer
support centre, tailoring training to different customersinformation needs. He later became
business development manager for the Pearson/Financial Times group, where he led the
development of freeway, one of the first end-user graphical user interfaces (Davies and
Hepworth, 1993). In 1993, he was appointed as a Senior Lecturer at Nanyang Technological
University in Singapore, where he helped to develop a new MSc programme in information
studies, and then six years later moved to Loughborough University, where he was
promoted first to a Readership and then to a Chair in Peoples Information Behaviour.
He retired in 2016 through ill health.
His research at Loughborough concentrated on how people interact with and use
information to enable them to achieve their objectives. This interest evolved over many
years while studying different groups of people, for example, patients with multiple
sclerosis (Hepworth et al., 2003), carers (Harrison et al., 2004) and students (Smith and
Hepworth, 2007). This led to understanding their information behaviour, needs and the
factors that affect their information experience (Hepworth, 2007), with a particular focus
stemming from these studies being the need to consider peoples information capabilities
and information literacy (Hepworth and Walton, 2009, 2013).
Aslib Journal of Information
Management
Vol. 69 No. 3, 2017
pp. 258-260
© Emerald PublishingLimited
2050-3806
DOI 10.1108/AJIM-04-2017-0095
Received 18 April 2017
Revised 18 April 2017
Accepted 18 April 2017
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/2050-3806.htm
258
AJIM
69,3

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