Louise Spiteri
Chair of Senate, 2022-2025
Member, Executive Committee and Academic and Student Affairs Committee
Dr. Spiteri is a Professor in the School of Information Management and interim Vice-Chair of Senate, Academic Programs (2020-2021). Dr. Spiteri has been a member of Senate since 2015, and has served in a variety of positions, including membership on the Senate Planning and Governance Committee and the Senate Nominating Committee, and has chaired a number of Senate awards committees.
Dr. Spiteri completed a BA and MA in Canadian history at York University, minoring in French studies, as well as courses in Italian and German. Following her studies at York, Dr. Spiteri completed a Bachelor of Education at the University of Toronto, where she specialized in History and French. Dr. Spiteri was a high-school teacher in Ontario, where she taught French and History across grades 9-12. During this time, Dr. Spiteri developed a love of information management and, in particular, classification systems, and decided to pursue these interests via further studies. Dr. Spiteri completed a Master of Library and Information Science at Western University, and a PhD in Information Studies at the University of Toronto. Dr. Spiteri was actively involved in student life during her studies and served as president of the doctoral student association at the University of Toronto.
Dr. Spiteri teaches in the areas of knowledge management, metadata, and records and information management. Her research interests focus on creating metadata and social tagging systems that reflect the needs, perspectives, and languages of the end user, and exploring how data can be linked across the semantic web. More recently, her research marries her personal commitment to environmental sustainability by examining the information needs of zero waste lifestyle practitioners. Dr. Spiteri has co-authored two books related to linked data and social tagging, has over 65 peer-reviewed publications, and has delivered close to a hundred invited presentations in academic and professional venues.
Dr. Spiteri is a member of several scholarly and professional associations, including the Association for Information Science & Technology (where she serves on the Governance Committee), the Association for Library and Information Science Education (where she serves on the Governance Committee, and also served as the President and Past President), ARMA International, and The Association for Intelligent Information Management.
In her personal life, Dr. Spiteri has been involved in choral singing since childhood. She embraces ethical veganism, zero-waste living, slow food and fashion, and minimalism. She is an avid cinephile, with a particular love of films of the silent era – especially German Expressionism – and Hollywood films of the 1930s and 1940s.