Joseph T. Tennis is an Associate Professor and Associate Dean of Faculty Affairs at the University of Washington Information School, Adjunct Associate Professor in Linguistics, and a member of the Textual Studies and Museology faculty advisory groups at the University of Washington. He is President of the International Society for Knowledge Organization and Immediate Past Chair of the Dublin Core Metadata Initiative. He is on the Library Quarterly and Knowledge Organization editorial boards, and a member of the InterPARES Trust research team – a multidisciplinary digital records preservation research project with researchers across six continents.

Tennis works in classification theory, metadata versioning, ethics of knowledge organization work, descriptive informatics, and authenticity. He teaches courses in classification, metadata, and intellectual foundations of information science at the University of Washington iSchool.

He won the 2013 ALISE/Bohdan S. Wynar Award, for "The Strange Case of Eugenics: A Subject’s Ontogeny in a Long-Lived Classification Scheme and the Question of Collocative Integrity" [1]; and one of three best papers in the Theory and Methodology Track at Digital Cultural Heritage 2015 for his paper, "Archival Metadata for Digital Cultural Heritage: Conceptual Provenance, Contextual Forensics, and the Authority of the Found Digital Object," [2].

Tennis holds his Bachelor of Arts in Religious Studies from Lawrence University, and Master of Library Science, and Specialist Degree in Book History both from Indiana University, and a PhD in Information Science from the University of Washington. He has thrice been a visiting scholar at the State University of São Paulo. And in the spring of 2016 he was an invited professor at the Université Charles-de-Gaulle - Lille 3.



[1] Tennis, J. T. (2012). "The Strange Case of Eugenics: A Subject’s Ontogeny in a Long-Lived Classification Scheme and the Question of Collocative Integrity. " In Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology 63(7): 1350-1359

[2] Tennis, J. T. (2015). "Archival Metadata for Digital Cultural Heritage: Conceptual Provenance, Contextual Forensics, and the Authority of the Found Digital Object." In 2015 Digital Cultural Heritage. Vol. 6: 399-402.