Bulletin, December/January 2006


Inside ASIS&T

ASIS&T 2005 Annual Meeting Coverage

As this issue of the Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology goes to press, members of ASIS&T have gathered in Charlotte , North Carolina , for the 2005 Annual Meeting. Complete coverage of the meeting will be included in the February/March 2006 issue of the Bulletin. But to the whet the appetite for meeting coverage for those who didn't attend, here are the winners of the 2005 ASIS&T Awards:

Award of Merit - Marcia Bates

Watson Davis Award - Michael Buckland

Research in Information Science Award - Carol Kuhlthau

Information Science Book Award - Information Politics on the Web by Richard Rogers 

Thomson ISI/ASIS&T Outstanding Information Science Teacher Award - Peiling Wang

John Wiley & Sons Best JASIST Paper Award - Soo Young Rieh for "On the Web at Home: Information Seeking and Web Searching in the Home Environment"

Thomson ISI/ASIS&T Citation Analysis Research Grant - Dimitris A. Dervos, Thomas Kalkanis and Nikolaos Samaras

Thomson ISI/ASIS&T Doctoral Dissertation Proposal Scholarship - Svetalana Symonenko

ProQuest/ASIS&T Doctoral Dissertation Award - Weiping Yue

Pratt Severn Best Student Research Paper Award - Mary Gabehart

James M. Cretsos Leadership Award - K.T.L. Vaughan

Chapter-of-the-Year - Los Angeles Chapter

Student Chapter-of-the-Year - Simmons College and the University of Washington

Chapter Member-of-the-Year - Beatrice Pulliam

Chapter Event-of-the-Year - Syndicate, Aggregate, Communicate: New Web Tools in Real Applications for Libraries, Companies and Regular Folk (New England ASIS&T) and To Google or Not to Google (Indiana and Michigan Chapters)

Chapter Electronic Publication-of-the-Year - OASIS, newsletter of the Los Angeles Chapter of ASIS&T

SIG-of-the-Year - SIG/International Information Issues (SIG/III)

New Officers and Directors Join ASIS&T Board

A new ASIS&T administrative year got underway during the 2005 Annual Meeting in Charlotte , bringing new faces to the Board of Directors. Three new members were welcomed to the Board at the conclusion of the meeting, while three retiring members were thanked for their service.

            Each of the new members will serve the society for three years. Those elected to the Board during the summer balloting are Edie Rasmussen, president-elect; and Suzie Allard and Carol Barry, directors-at-large.

            As the new members took their seats, Michael Leach, elected last year as president-elect, assumed the presidency from Nick Belkin, who now serves as past president for one year. Former president Samantha K. Hastings and directors-at-large Allison Brueckner and Beverly Colby completed their terms of service on the Board.  

Michael Leach is the director, Physics Research Library, Harvard University , and head of collection development of the Cabot Science Library at Harvard, where he earned his BA degree. He holds the MLIS from the University of Rhode Island . A member of ASIS&T since 1995, Michael has chaired the New England chapter, as well as its program and publications committees, and has served as newsletter editor. Among his SIG activities is service as chair of SIG/Management and on the SIG Steering Committee. He has also served on the Leadership Development Committee. He is the recipient of the ASIS&T Cretsos Leadership Award and of the NEASIST Member-of-the-Year Award.

Edie Rasmussen is professor and director of the School of Library , Archival and Information Studies at the University of British Columbia , Vancouver . Prior to joining UBC, she was a professor in the School of Information Sciences , University of Pittsburgh , where she chaired the doctoral studies committee and served for three years as department chair. Among many contributions to ASIS&T over the years, she has chaired an ASIS&T Annual Meeting (2002), chaired the Research Committee, held elected and advisory positions for the Pittsburgh ASIS&T chapter and the Pittsburgh Student Chapter and has served on many ASIS&T awards juries.

Suzie Allard is an assistant professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Tennessee where she teaches courses in digital libraries, systems analysis, information communication and collection development. She holds a doctorate in communication, an MSLS and a bachelor's degree in economics. Prior to her academic career, Suzie had extensive experience in the corporate sector. As an independent consultant, she led projects for technology evaluation, strategic product development and market research in the entertainment industry. Since joining ASIS&T in 1999, she has been active at all levels of the Society, including service on national committees and task forces and leadership roles in SIGs and chapters. She has been recognized by ASIS&T with the James Cretsos Leadership Award and the SIG Member-of-the-Year Award.

Carol Barry is an associate professor at the School of Library and Information Science at Louisiana State University . She teaches courses in information science, information needs analysis, electronic information resources, and abstracting and indexing. Carol has been a member of ASIS&T since the mid-1980s and has served the Society in numerous ways. She was co-editor and indexer of the Proceedings of the 2004 Annual Meeting; has served as chair of several ASIS&T award juries; and has been a member of several national committees. Carol has been a member of the JASIST editorial board for several years and is currently an associate editor of the journal. In addition, Carol was awarded the Best JASIST Paper Award in 1995.

News About ASIS&T Chapters

ASIS&T-EC Meets Austrian Colleagues

At the specific request of conference organizers, namely the Working Group on Electronic Media of the Austrian Association of (Academic) Librarians (VOB) and the Austrian Association for Documentation and Information (OGDI), and the Library of the Free University of Bolzano, the ASIS&T European Chapter (EC) held a panel session at ODOK '05, in Italy in September.

The session was organized by Christian Schlogl ( University of Graz ) and moderated by Tatjana Aparac-Jelusić (University J.J. Strossmayer, Osijek , Croatia ), EC chair. Panelists included Gerhard Richter, president of  OGDI, Werner Schlacher, director of the library of the University of Graz , Sebastian Eschenbach, director of information professions studies, Fachhochschule Eisenstadt , Austria , and Michel Menou, ASIS&T international liaison.

The debate in German and English centered on An information society with(out) information professionals/Information professionals with(out) an information society?

An introduction and initial statements by the panelists are available on the EC website and on the ODOK site at http://voeb.uibk.ac.at/odok2005/.  

The Los Angeles Chapter of ASIS&T (LACASIS) went right back to work after the ASIS&T Annual Meeting with its annual Fall Workshop. This year's program, Search Forward:  Emerging Internet Capabilities, offered an overview of and conversation about the newest developments in Internet searching. Among the new tools and technologies discussed are faceted browsing, multimedia search, mapping with data layers, clustering and display of results, as well as the implications of these new technologies from the policy makers' perspective. The program was scheduled for Friday, November 18, at Chapman University .

The Central Ohio ASIS&T Chapter (CO-ASIS&T) began its fall schedule with a program on Dewey Decimal Classification: News and New Views, featuring Libbie Crawford, marketing manager, Dewey Decimal Classification at OCLC. She provided an overview of Dewey, focusing on Dewey activities worldwide, including what translations are underway, how to keep up with changes in the classification and how the Editorial Policy Committee works.

For the month after its Dewey program, CO-ASIS&T turned its attention to Your Environmental Scan for a workshop featuring Alane Wilson of OCLC. Wilson has developed a series of basic processes to help institutions better describe and understand the environments in which they operate.

The Northern Ohio Chapter of ASIS&T (NORASIST) selected Usability Testing for the Information Professional as the topic for its annual meeting presentation. The program included a tour of the newly opened Kent State University Usability Lab. David Robins and Jason Holmes, both with Kent State , were key people in the development of the facility and were the leaders of this program.

ASIS&T Indiana (at the University of Indiana ) co-sponsored with the Rob Kling Center for Social Informatics a presentation on The Culture of Information: Ubiquitous Computing and Representations of Reality. The speaker was Paul Dourish, Donald Bren School of Information and Computer Science at the University of California at Irvine . He offered a broad discussion of ubiquitous computing and the consequences of the model of information as commodity.

            New England Chapter of ASIST (NEASIST) selected Buy, Hack, or Build: Optimizing Your Systems for Your Users and Your Sanity as its first post-Annual Meeting program of the year. The chapter invited three creative problem solvers to show how existing information systems can work better - legally, efficiently and brilliantly. Joshua Porter, director of Web development for User Interface Engineering, spoke on Web 2.0 for the Rest of Us. Matt Eichner, director of strategic business development at Endeca Solutions, looked at Findability and the Power of Hierarchical Facets. Casey Bisson, e-learning application developer at Plymouth State University, discussed OPAC Hacks.

News about ASIS&T Members

Helen Tibbo, professor in the School of Information and Library Science (SILS) at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill , has been inducted as a Fellow of the Society of American Archivists.

Gary Marchionini, Paul Solomon and Cathy Blake of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science (SILS) have been awarded a $150,000 unrestricted research gift from the Microsoft Corporation. The gift is intended to expand their research on how people annotate structured information.

            Terry Brooks of the Information School at the University of Washington is now associate editor, North America, of Information Research: An International Electronic Journal, a publication he has long served as a member of the Editorial Board. 

Call for Papers for ASIS&T 2006 
Information Realities: Shaping the Digital Future for All
November 3-9, 2006, Austin, Texas

Information technology has enabled an expanding digital world, inextricably linked to our physical existence but revolutionary in terms of human creativity and thought. New technologies for mobile communication, massively distributed collaboration and real-time information sharing are radically impacting human interactions. A continuing demand for powerful information organization, aggregation and dissemination tools to harness these new information realities is likely.

      However, the key to understanding these trends must be found at human and social levels. To reflect on and address the challenges ahead, we must face some critical questions:

  •       What are the implications of these digital trends?

  •       What opportunities are arising?

  •       Are there dangers that we need to prepare for?

  •       How will the future information world be shaped and who will shape it?

      ASIS&T 2006 challenges us to explore this moment in the history of information science as people seamlessly move between their physical and digital worlds to create information realities for themselves and others.

      Submissions by researchers and practitioners are solicited on a wide range of topics including but not limited to new theoretical perspectives on information use and management; ethical and legal implications of digital worlds; the nature of the information profession in the digital future; user, organizational and cultural analyses of information realities; future information architectures to both build and harness information realities; implications for information (seeking) behavior and retrieval; new forms of human-computer/information interactions; distributed collaboration and information sharing; enhanced access to multi-format and multimedia information; learning and education in the digital future; digital storytelling and presentation in an attention economy; conflicts in information realities, their recognition and resolution; preserving our cultural records in a digital age; and scientific underpinnings of new information designs and uses.

Type of Submissions

      The program committee will accept the following types of submissions:

Contributed papers present original, recent research and design projects, theoretical developments or innovative practical applications providing more general insight into an area of practice.

Contributed posters/short papers present new and promising work or preliminary results of research projects or results of design projects, practical implementations of an organization's practices or industry innovations. 

Symposia and panels present topics for discussion such as cutting-edge research and design, analyses of hot or emerging trends, opinions on controversial issues, reports by practitioners on current information science and technology projects, and contrasting viewpoints from experts in complementary professional areas. 

Pre-conference sessions present topics such as theoretical research, management strategies and new and innovative systems or products, typically for purposes of concept development or continuing education.

      For more information, including submission guidelines and deadlines, please visit the ASIS&T website (http://www.asis.org/Conferences/AM06/am06call.html)