The Doctor of Philosophy (Ph.D.) in Information Science at IU Bloomington is one of the oldest, continuously running information science doctoral programs in the nation. Our mission is to train the next generation of information scientists—professionals who want to understand, predict, and advance the ways in which people use information systems and communication technologies.

We welcome students from all over the United States and world. Most plan to enter academia. Our alumni have worked at institutions such as the University of North Carolina, UCLA, the University of Hawaii, Kent State University, and the University of Alabama. Other graduates go on to work for organizations like NASA, the Langley Research Center, and Oracle.

The Ph.D. in Information Science is designed to prepare you for research and teaching in academia. Your core requirements will help you develop a strong understanding of the research process and what constitutes scholarly research. You’ll also learn to identify and conceptualize significant research problems so that you may undertake new research initiatives and contribute new knowledge to the field.

We encourage you to research the ideas and questions that fascinate you most. Recent areas of concentrated study include, but are not limited to:

• Archives
• Biodiversity information and culture
• Computer-mediated communication
• Critical information and library science
• Cultural analytics
• Cultural heritage informatics
• Data and text mining
• Digital and computational humanities
• Digital curation
• Digital libraries
• Documentation
• eScience
• Gender and technology
• History of the book, readership, and publishing
• Knowledge organization (KO), including classification, ontologies, and metadata
• Knowledge sharing
• Libraries
• Online communities
• Philosophy of information and information ethics
• Records management
• Social informatics
• Social media mining
• Technology and diversity
• Text encoding and digital editions

Regardless of your specific career interests, you will graduate prepared to work as a professional researcher, teacher, and consultant.