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Alistair Black has been a full professor in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, USA since January 2009, having previously taught and researched for nineteen years at Leeds Metropolitan University, UK. He is author of the following books: A New History of the English Public Library (1996) and The Public Library in Britain 1914-2000 (2000). He is also co-author of Understanding Community Librarianship (1997); The Early Information Society in Britain, 1900-1960 (2007); and Books, Buildings and Social Engineering (2009), a socio-architectural history of early public libraries in Britain. With Peter Hoare, he edited Volume 3 (covering 1850-2000) of the Cambridge History of Libraries in Britain and Ireland (2006). He was chair of the Library History Group of the Library Association (1992-1999); and of the IFLA Section on Library History (2003-2007) and as editor of the international journal Library History (2004-2008) and North American editor of Library and Information History (2009-2013). He is the current editor of the journal Library Trends. Presently, his research focuses on the history of corporate libraries and staff magazines and the design of public libraries in the 1960s.