Prof Ina Fourie joined the Department in July 2001 as an Associate Professor. In January 2010 she was promoted to Full Professor and became Head of the Department in 2020, and has been appointed as Chair for The School of Information Technology from January 2022. She is an elected officer at the EU Chapter of iSchools 2022-2023, for the Research and Supervision Section. She is also the Chair for the Exxaro Chair in Extended Reality (XR) Technology.
She started her lecturing career at the University of South Africa (Unisa) in 1988 where she was respectively a junior lecturer, lecturer and later senior lecturer. At Unisa she taught various aspects of information organisation and retrieval including indexing, abstracting, thesaurus construction, online searching and developing personal databases. Here she gained extensive experience in distance education and teaching adult learners who were mostly employed fulltime. She started her career as a librarian and later senior librarian at the Atomic Energy Corporation of South Africa.
Prof Fourie is currently involved in teaching undergraduate and postgraduate modules concerning information literacy, information retrieval, information organisation, information behaviour and information seeking. Students completing their masters' and doctoral studies under her supervision are working on a variety of topics including various aspects of information needs and information behaviour (her main research focus), aspects of information literacy such as workplace information literacy and distance learning programmes in information literacy, bridging the digital divide, the role of the library in various contexts, legal depositories, and information services in various contexts.
Apart from a number of national associations such as the Library and Information Association of South Africa (LIASA), the Southern Africa Online User Group (SAOUG), Prof Fourie is a member of executive (treasurer) of the Association American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST) (formerly the American Society for Information Science and Technology), the European Association for Health Information and Libraries (EAHIL), KMSA (Knowledge Management South Africa), and SCIP (Society for Competitive Intelligence Professionals)
She is a member of the Editorial Advisory Board of several international journals such as Online Information Review, Library Hi Tech, and locally of Mousaion and the South African Journal of Libraries and Information Science. She regularly reviews articles for ASLIB Journal of Information Mangement and occasionally for other international journals such as Journal of Documentation, Journal of Librarianship & Information Science, African Journal of Library, Archives and Information Science, Nursing Education Today, Library and Information Science Research, and national journals such as Innovation and South African Journal of Information Management.
She was a regular book reviewer for The Electronic Library and Online Information Review for many years and occasionally for other journals such as Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology and Library Information Management. Occasionally she still writes book reviews on request.
She does reviews for the National Research Foundation (NRF), various national and international conference programmes and occasionally for international funding bodies and book publishers.
In the African contexts she is an external examiner for masters and doctoral studies for the Makerere University (Uganda). Replace please: She also serves as external examiner for some Africa universities as well as internationnally.
Ina has been invited as a guest lecturer and visiting researcher at the University of Milwaukee (Wisconsin), University of Alabama (USA), University at Buffalo (New York) (USA) and Victoria University of Wellington (New Zealand). Her research collaborators include academics and practitioners from The Netherlands, USA, Australia, UK, Sweden and Israel, as well as library and information science academics and practitioners and healthcare professionals in the South African context.
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