Scienceשפרה ברוכסון-ארביב

Shifra Baruchson-Arbib

Shifra Baruchson-Arbib is an Israeli information scientist and historian at Bar-Ilan University who developed the field of Social Information Science.

born 1951Founding Bar-Ilan's Information Science departmentDeveloping Social Information ScienceResearch on Hebrew book history

Born: 12 December 1951, Tel Aviv
Occupation: information scientist, historian, university teacher
Education: Bar-Ilan University

Shifra Baruchson-Arbib was born in 1951 in Tel Aviv

Shifra Baruchson-Arbib was born in Tel Aviv in December 1951 as Zipora Baruchson, into a rabbinical family. Her father, Shlomo Baruchson, owned the Shalom publishing house, and her uncle Yehuda Makavy ran a publishing company. She is married to Chaim Eric Arbib.

She began studying at Bar-Ilan University in 1970, in Bible, Jewish history and library science. Her master's and doctoral work in Jewish history dealt with manuscripts, rare books and reading culture.

She joined Bar-Ilan as a research assistant in 1974. In 1990 she became head of the library studies department and renamed it the Department of Information Science, and enrollment grew from 50 to 500 students in two years. She headed it again in later periods, supervised more than 70 research students, and served as Dean of Humanities in 2015 and 2016.

In 1993 she won the Shazar Prize for her book on the reading culture of Italian Jews in the late Renaissance. She also studied hypnosis in the United States and is certified in New York State.