Teaching and Research Staff3793190

Professor Philip Hider

BSc(Hons), MLib, PhD, FCLIP, AALIA

Professor Philip Hider is currently leading an ARC Discovery Project on the role of public libraries in rural Australia, and has recently completed an ARC Linkage Project on the codesign of public library spaces. He was Head of the School of Information and Communication Studies, and before that the School of Information Studies, from 2008 until 2023, during which time he led, amongst many other initiatives, a comprehensive renewal of his School’s curriculum, and the development of the Information Studies discipline’s research capacity that resulted in progression to a rating of ‘Above World Standard’ in the 2018 (and latest) Excellence in Research Australia exercise.

Prof Hider holds an Honours degree in Social Anthropology from the London School of Economics, a Masters of Librarianship from the University of Wales, Aberystwyth, and a PhD from City University, London. He worked at the British Library from 1995-1997, and in Singapore, at its National Library, from 1997-2003. He is a Fellow of the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals and an Associate Member of the Australian Library and Information Association. Prof Hider served as the inaugural Head of the CSU Virtual Campus from 2014-15, as the Acting Executive Dean of the Faculty of Education from June 2015 until July 2016, as the Deputy Presiding Officer of CSU’s Academic Senate from 2018-2020, and as the Associate Dean Research of the Faculty of Arts and Education from 2020-21. He was also seconded on a part-time basis to the Australian Government's Office for Learning and Teaching in 2016. He researches and teaches in the areas of information and knowledge organisation, and public library services. He is the author of well over 100 scholarly papers, and his best-selling text, Information Resource Description (2012; 2018).

Philip's two primary research areas are public library services, and information and knowledge organisation; he has also made significant contributions in various cognate areas, including information retrieval and information architecture. His public libraries research examines the role, use, and design of public libraries, and had led to two ARC grants: a Linkage investigating the codesign of public library spaces and a Discovery examining the role and impact of public libraries in rural Australia. His original field of expertise is information organisation, which examines the way information resources are described and categorised, and how these descriptions and categorisations (i.e., metadata) can be used to retrieve resources in optimal ways. Philip has conducted research in and for a range of institutions, including the National Library of Australia, the State Library of NSW, the State Library of Victoria, and the National Library Board of Singapore, as well as the Australian Research Council and the Australian government's Office for Learning and Teaching, generating around $1.5M of grant income. He has published well over 100 scholarly articles, most of them as lead author, in a wide range of Library and Information Studies journals, and co-leads CSU’s Libraries Research Group. He also serves on several editorial boards, including those of the Journal of the Australian Library and Information Association (JALIA), the Journal of Documentation, and Public Library Quarterly, and had guest edited two special issues of JALIAand an issue of Library Trends.

Philip has been involved in the teaching of Library and Information Studies (LIS) for almost three decades. His text, Information Resource Description, has been used in many information and knowledge organisation courses around the world. He has also published various papers on the teaching of both information organisation and LIS more generally, and previously conducted many short courses on different aspects of library cataloguing.

Philip has supervised the following research students to completion:

Bodhinayaka, Dilini. PhD. 2024. ‘Commencing undergraduate students' prior understanding of academic libraries in Sri Lanka.’

Coe, Mary. PhD. 2022. ‘How readers make sense of active e-book indexes.’

Khan, Arif. PhD. 2022. ‘An exploratory prioritisation of key elements in library and information science practicum supervision.’

Bacic, Marijana. PhD. 2020. ‘A study of undergraduate student uptake of library discovery tools.’

Gao, Lily. PhD. 2014. ‘Information seeking and use of Chinese offshore students studying in Australian university programs.’

Burford, Sally. PhD. 2010. ‘The practice of Web information architecture in large organisations.’

Ruthven, Joan. DInfoMgt. 2009. ‘Characteristics, preferences, and needs of adult Internet users in a New South Wales public library environment.’

Philip has served on various professional committees, such as the Australian Committee on Cataloguing from 2004-09 and the Subject Analysis and Access Section of the International Federation of Library Associations and Institutions from 2021-25. He has a lengthy consulting record, conducted over 50 short courses, and published many articles for the professional literature, including book reviews.