Last week the Association for Information Science and Technology announced that I have won the 2019 Clarivate Analytics Outstanding Information Science Teacher Award. This award recognises and honours sustained and unique contributions to teaching information science (including the use of innovative and imaginative teaching materials and methods), research and professional association activities related to teaching excellence, and the impact of teaching on students, colleagues and institutions. It also acknowledges prior awards for teaching.

In the list of past winners that stretches back to the 1980s there are a number of people that I have long admired, including Carol Tenopir (University of Tennessee), Candy Schwartz (formerly of Simmons University, Boston), and Howard Rosenbaum (Indiana University). It makes me very proud to think that my name will soon be added to this list. The award itself will be made at this year’s ASIST Annual Meeting, which takes place in Melbourne, Australia between 19th and 23rd October 2019.

The press release on the ASIST web site provides further details of my nomination for the award and the judging process. I am very grateful to those who nominated me, the jury members who considered my nomination alongside all the others, and the award sponsors. I am also indebted to all the students over the past three decades who have indulged my passion for teaching, and who have willingly joined in the various activities that I have devised to ‘entertain’ them in class, such as:

• learning to knit – while also considering mechanisms of tacit knowledge transfer
• competing in the Bibliographic Pub Quiz – and sharpening up their referencing practice
• watching a film about the Challenger disaster – and then discussing power relations in knowledge management

Cakes for the winners of the bibliographic pub quiz in 2012