Dear friends and colleagues,
Today I received the sad news that Dr. Woody Horton has passed away. Dr. Horton
was known to many of us for his work in Information Literacy. You can leave a
message to his family at the following site
https://www.adventfuneral.com/archives/forest-woody-horton-jr.htm
Kind regards,
Helen Boelens.
The funeral notice reads as follows:
Forest Windham "Woody" Horton Jr.
PASSED ON DECEMBER 7, 2017
Forest Windham "Woody" Horton Jr. (Age 87)
Forest Windham "Woody" Horton, Jr., beloved father and grandfather, died of
natural causes in his home in Washington, D.C., on December 7, 2017. Dr.
Horton was born in California, and he graduated from the University of
California at Berkeley in 1951 and received a Masters degree from UCLA in 1952.
He then received a teaching and research fellowship at Columbia University in
New York for one year, and following that entered military service for three
years, serving in the Army Counterintelligence field. Following his military
service he became employed as a government civilian employee at the Army
Ballistic Missile Agency (ABMA) at Redstone Arsenal in information technology,
serving in the Werner von Braun missile program, where he learned to program
and operate the early IBM mainframe computers.
He was married following government service at ABMA and moved to Washington DC
where he became employed in the IT field in a succession of Federal agencies,
including GSA, USIS, USAID, State, EPA, BOB (now OMB) and the Executive Office
of the President, where he served as IT director of foreign trade programs
(STR). His last regular assignment with the Federal Government was as Studies
Director for the Federal Paperwork Commission, where he authored the
Information Resources Management (IRM) report.
He then went overseas for the State Department, USIS and USAID, serving in the
Africa bureaus of those agencies for several years. He ended his overseas
Federal Government duty as the USAID IT director in Saigon, Vietnam. Following
retirement from the US government, Dr. Horton studied at IMD in Switzerland,
received a doctorate from the University of Lausanne, and was eventually
nominated to be Executive Assistant to the American Ambassador to Germany. He
also simultaneously served as the American consular officer for the State
Department in Lausanne, while there attending school, serving in that role as a
U.S. Diplomat.
He then was hired by the University of Maryland to teach at American military
bases overseas, and following teaching overseas, he returned to the US and was
employed as a consultant by the National Commission on Libraries and
Information Science (NCLIS), where he authored a number of studies identifying
and prescribing a central leadership and management role for libraries and
librarians in information management activities, including information literacy.
Finally, after fully retiring from the U.S. Government arena, he was hired as a
consultant by UNESCO to prepare studies in information policy and information
literacy. He also served on the PGI (Program for General Information) Council
for a brief time. He remained active in the information literacy field the rest
of his life.
Dr. Horton has authored 40 books, or major US Government reports, or
international reports, including one fiction work (The Technocrats), many of
which have been translated into foreign languages. He also authored several
hundred articles for scholarly journals, newspapers, and magazines, in his
fields of primary interest - IRM, Information Literacy, knowledge management,
and the role of the CIO.
Dr. Horton is survived by two daughters, Tina Horton LaForce of Damascus
Maryland and Ingrid Lisle of Frederick Maryland, five grandchildren, and one
great-grandchild. He was preceded in death by his ex-wife, Karin Horton, who
passed away on November 27, 2017. Services for Dr. Horton will be held on
Saturday, December 30, 2017, at 4 p.m., at Advent Funeral & Cremation Services
located at 7211 Lee Highway, Falls Church, VA.
