Biography
Diane M. Rasmussen Pennington is Professor of Social Informatics in the School of Computing, Engineering, and the Built Environment (SCEBE) at Edinburgh Napier University. She has taken over as Director of Edinburgh Napier's Centre for Social Informatics/Social Informatics Research Group from Associate Professor Peter Cruickshank. Previously, Prof Hazel Hall led the centre, who is now Emeritus Professor.
Diane earned an MS and a PhD in information science from the School of Library and Information Sciences (now the College of Information) at the University of North Texas and a PGDip in Academic Practice from the University of Strathclyde. Diane holds the permanent title of Visiting Scholar at the University of Sydney. She is a Fellow of Advance HE and of the Royal Society of Arts. She is an Honorary Member of CILIP Scotland (CILIPS).
Previously, Diane was a Senior Lecturer in Information Science at the University of Strathclyde's iSchool in Glasgow, Scotland. She has also worked in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at Western University, the School of Library and Information Sciences at North Carolina Central University, and the School of Library and Information Studies at Texas Woman's University. Before becoming an academic, she was an information literacy librarian, a systems/cataloguing librarian, and an information technology professional in industry.
Her research centres around social informatics, which examines broadly the relationships among people, society, information, and technology. Her current specific areas of focus are ethical cataloguing, non-textual metadata, social media, and online health information provision. She has edited two books: Social media for academics: A practical guide and Indexing and retrieval of non-text information, and she co-edited Social tagging in a linked data environment. She has delivered over 150 peer-reviewed/invited presentations, and she has published more than 40 articles in highly-ranked information science journals such as Journal of Documentation, Library & Information Science Research, Knowledge Organisation, Journal of the Medical Library Association, and Journal of Information Science. She has participated in research projects funded by multiple agencies in the United States, Canada, and the United Kingdom.
Diane continues to supervise doctoral students who remain at Strathclyde. She is teaching Information Interactions, Advanced Information Interactions, and Digital Business Environments, as well as supervising MSc students in the 2023 spring and summer trimesters. At her previous universities, she taught modules in cataloging and classification, organisation of information, social media for libraries, research methods and statistics, systems analysis, business intelligence, database design, web usability, web development, metadata, indexing and abstracting, and library systems. She has supervised many postgraduate research projects, and she has served on many multiple thesis supervisory committees and thesis examination committees.
Diane is currently Chair of the Metadata and Discovery Group in the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals (CILIP), the 2023 Vice President of CILIPS, a Standing Committee Member of IFLA's Training & Education Section (SET), a Co-Chair of the iSchools Women's Coalition, and staff at The U2 Conference. She is a former Chair of ASIS&T's European Chapter and a past president of the Canadian Association for Information Science (CAIS/ACSI).