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Editor's Desktop: Getting to Know Us
The results of two recent surveys concerning ASIS&T are the focus of this issue. First Trudi Bellardo Hahn and Liwen Vaughn report on last-year's e-mail survey of the membership. In addition to covering the
current data, they utilize prior surveys of the Society to highlight changes, both those that are particular to ASIS&T and those that seem to be part of general trends experienced by most scientific associations.
In the second report Donald Case and Suzie Allard review the results of their research regarding JASIS&T, the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. They sought to
answer questions raised by the JASIS&T Editorial Board, which consists of ASIS&T members, and by Wiley, the Journal's publisher. Allard and Case used multiple approaches to uncover information about the readers, non-readers and contributors to JASIS&T and their views of the Journal and the Society. Sam Hastings, current ASIS&T President, also provides an update on the ASIS&T Board of Directors meeting held in association with the IA Summit in Austin on February 27, 2004.
We continue to review international efforts to use information and communication technology (ICT) in development. Sônia Elisa Caregnato and Ana Maria Mielniczuk de Moura of the Federal University of Rio Grande do Sul
in Porto Allegre, Brazil, provide a view of the "telecentre" movement that is part of the social inclusion effort in Brazil and a discussion of the five telecentres established in impoverished neighborhoods of Porto Allegre.
The Faculty of the School of Library and Communication at the university are responsible for training the community-based monitors for these centers, who are in turn responsible for training and assisting their users. This
paper was ranked highly in the SIG/III International Paper Competition from 2002, and the authors have updated it for publication in the Bulletin.
Finally, Victoria McCargar, senior editor for library projects at the Los Angeles Times, considers the state-of-the-art for automatic text summarization, especially automatic extraction of text, and the
challenges of that activity.
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