Obituary of Forest Windham Horton

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.