About the Directors
Joyce Latham, Ph.D.
Latham comes to LIS education after an extended career in libraries. With a background in cataloging and technical services, she became closely involved with retrospective conversion and automation projects. She was the head of Automated Services for the Southern Maryland Regional Library and worked on the development of the statewide Sailor Project. From there she went to Chicago Public Library as the head of Information Technology.
After three years at the University of Illinois studying the social influences on the development of intellectual freedom in public libraries, she went to upstate New York as a library / public library system director. With the completion of her dissertation, she came to the School of Information Studies, where she specializes in public libraries, intellectual freedom and library history. Latham’s revisionary research focus in on the activist role of librarians in the development of culture.
Michael Zimmer, Ph.D.
Michael Zimmer, PhD, is an assistant professor in the School of Information Studies at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, and co-director of the Center for Information Policy Research. With a background in new media and Internet studies, the philosophy of technology, and information policy, Zimmer studies the ethical dimensions of new media and information technologies, with particular interest in privacy, social media, information ethics, access to knowledge, and value-conscious design.
Zimmer received his PhD in 2007 from the Department of Media, Culture, and Communication at New York University. He was a Student Fellow at the Information Law Institute at NYU Law from 2004-2007, and was the Microsoft Resident Fellow at the Information Society Project at Yale Law School for 2007-2008. Zimmer joined UW-Milwaukee’s School of Information Studies in 2008.
Zimmer serves on numerous advisory boards, including UWM’s Center for 21st Century Studies, the Washington, D.C.-based Future of Privacy Forum think tank, and the NSF-sponsored Values-in-Design Council. He has participated in various public interest activities, and provided expert advice and consultation for projects at New York Public Library, Google, and Microsoft.
