2025 ASIS&T President’s Lecture – Information Behaviour as a Research Lens for Agility in Change Enablement, Transition, and Flow – Workplace and Everyday Life

About Dr. Ina Fourie
Dr. Ina Fourie retired at the end of May 2025 from the University of Pretoria (South Africa) as Full Professor, former Head of the Department of Information Science (2020–2023) and Chair of the School of Information Technology (2022–2023). To continue pursuing her academic interests, expanding her research activities, and strengthening international collaboration, she accepted an appointment as a Research Associate in the Department of Information Science. The University of Pretoria has recently appointed her as Emeritus Professor of Information Science. She is an NRF-rated (B2) South African researcher.

Ina’s 24 years of service at the University of Pretoria were preceded by 13 years at the University of South Africa (Unisa), a very large distance teaching university that inspired both her doctoral research on distance education in information retrieval (completed in 1995) and a postgraduate degree in tertiary education (completed in 1992).

Her main research focus areas include information behaviour, current awareness services, information literacy, and autoethnography, with a special focus on cancer, palliative care, and other existential contexts. She is a regular speaker and author in national and international forums across library and information science, education, and healthcare.

Ina serves on the editorial advisory boards of several scholarly journals, including the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST) and Cambridge Forum on AI: Culture and Society. She has held leadership positions in international organisations such as ASIS&T (Association for Information Science and Technology) (Treasurer, 2019–2023) and the Information Seeking in Context (ISIC) Standing Committee (Secretary and Vice-Chair respectively; 2018–2022). She is currently Chair-Elect of the iSchools Organization and will serve as Chair in 2026 and 2027.

She has published more than 140 articles, books, and conference papers, and has presented in over 18 countries. Her publications include books on research methods, information literacy and information behavior (Navigating Information Literacy in a Digital World, co-authored), autoethnography (Autoethnography for Librarians and Information Scientists, editor), Third Space, information sharing and participatory design (co-authored), and alerting services (How LIS Professionals Can Use Alerting Services, sole author). She is currently working on a sole-authored book on health information seeking and has recently signed a contract as editor of a new book on information behavior.

She views retirement as a new phase of academic freedom – creating space to explore a wider range of research interests, bridge the grey digital divide, strengthen international collaboration, and travel more extensively.