Thanking Associate Professor Bruce Fulton for His Work and Profound Impact

Dr. Bruce Fulton’s pathway at the University of Arizona began years ago when he started his undergrad major. He recalls jumping over many different disciplines including anthropology, geophysics, math, physics and computer science and, eventually, he graduated from the music department, with one of two people awarded a degree from the new guitar performance program. This interdisciplinarity and part of what he described as “serendipity” allowed him to have a successful career in both the corporate world and later the academic one.

His career as a professional musician started in the mid ’70s, but his prior knowledge in math and programming led him to focus on computerizing music stores rather than on music performance. “It’s a long progression how I finally ended up in the private sector working for educational technology and doing some computerized databases and things that started to intersect with digital collections and education research,” he says.

After some years working in the industry, he decided it was time to take an academic leave and pursue a master’s degree. The University of Arizona was his natural choice, and this time the then School of Information Resources and Library Science (SIRLS) captivated him. Dr. Fulton recalls that a common concern with the Arizona State Library people was “finding librarians who had technology training to be able to do the modern work of libraries,” which involved dealing with metadata and databases, and being able to do cataloging with digital resources. “That was just the natural hole that I was able to help start plugging, to get people up to speed on some of the technology. I had the corporate technical training to facilitate teaching those classes and was able to write grants to fund them,” he adds.

“That was at the point where all my technology training and experience were really coming into the field, and I started the PhD,” recalls Dr. Fulton. He brought over his technology instruction experience from the private sector. After many years developing programs for companies such as Microsoft and Intel, Dr. Fulton was familiar with curriculum methodologies to teach technology.

Until then, those mainly hands-on approaches had not been used in library schools before.“We introduced some of those innovations and other schools quickly adapted the kind of things we introduced here at the UA. We were awarded grants from the Institute for Museum and Library Service to demonstrate these techniques and prove them, it was exciting,” recalls Dr. Fulton. This input was fundamental for the school to be able to launch its first digital curation certificate, and some others, and later to back Dr. Bryan Heidorn’s idea on transforming the SIRLS into the iSchool.

Indisputably, Dr. Fulton’s career is full of accomplishments. However, when he is asked for the most rewarding experience as faculty in the iSchool, he is certain that it is his role as advisor for the certificates and the MA program. “Being able to shepherd those people through is a great accomplishment, it gives me great satisfaction. Most students are really good students, some others struggle, but, getting all of them through their program is as important as getting a major program through the faculty senate. That made me feel good,” he recognizes.

Dr. Fulton summarizes his time at the iSchool, “I played a big role in getting many of the current academic programs in place. I’ve also taught many of our technology classes. It’s been fun and rewarding getting those programs through, fine-tuning a lot of the policy and procedures. It’s been an interesting time.”

After these years of dedicated work and a remarkable legacy to the iSchool (now College of Information Science), Dr. Fulton retires. Although still coming back to teach the occasional class, he will be dedicating more time to his hobbies. He has some list of destinations to visit with his family, he loves photography (take a look at his photostream), and he has been making his own jewelry under his company name Arbor Verde Jewelry.