Geoffrey Ford was born in 1942 and studied Geology at the University of Leicester before completing a postgraduate diploma in Librarianship at the University of Sheffield in 1965. His wide and varied career in libraries saw him take posts at the Universities of Leicester, Durham, Bristol and Lancaster before he was appointed Senior Research Officer (later Principal Research Officer and Director) at Sheffield University Centre for Research on User Studies in 1976. He then moved to the University of Southampton where he remained until 1990 at which point he took the post of Librarian at Bristol University. From 1999 to 2002 he served as the Director of Information Studies at Bristol before retiring in 2002.

As well as holding academic library posts Geoffrey Ford also served as a consultant to several bodies including the British Library and the University Grants Commission and he held the position of Chair of SCONUL from 1998 to 2000. He was a member of the editorial board of the three academic library journals and had an international reputation for setting library standards. He died in September 2011.