ASIS&T - The Information Society for the Information Age

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ASIS&T 2007 Annual Meeting Coverage

As this issue of the Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology was being readied for online access, members of ASIS&T gathered in Milwaukee for the 2007 Annual Meeting. Complete coverage of the meeting will be included in the February/March 2008 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 2007 ASIS&T Awards:

Award of Merit – Donald H. Kraft

Watson Davis Award – Paula Galbraith

Research in Information Science Award – Ophir Frieder

Thomson ISI/ASIS&T Outstanding Information Science Teacher Award – Peter Ingwersen

John Wiley & Sons Best JASIST Paper Award – Catherine Blake and Wanda Pratt for “Collaborative Information Synthesis, Part 1” and “Collaborative Synthesis, Part 2: Recommendations for Information Systems to Support Synthesis”

Thomson ISI/ASIS&T Citation Analysis Research Grant – Philip M. Davis for Does Free Access to Scholarly Articles Increase Readership and Citation Impact?: A Randomized Controlled, Multi-publisher, Multi-journal Study

Thomson ISI/ASIS&T Doctoral Dissertation Proposal Scholarship – Phillip M. Edwards for Mapping Scholars’ Decision Processes and Factors that Influence How They Publish and Distribute Their Work

ProQuest/ASIS&T Doctoral Dissertation Award – W. John MacMullen for Contextual Analysis of Variation and Quality in Human-curated Gene Ontology Annotations

Chapter-of-the-Year – Los Angeles Chapter and New England Chapter

Student Chapter-of-the-Year – Simmons College and University of California at Los Angeles

Chapter Event-of-the-Year – Los Angeles Chapter for Working with Wikis

Chapter Publication-of-the-Year – Los Angeles Chapter for Observations of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (OASIS)

Chapter Innovation-of-the-Year – Indiana Chapter and Los Angeles Chapter

Chapter Member-of-the-Year – Caryn Anderson, New England Chapter, and Dawn Pointer McCleskey, Potomac Valley Chapter

SIG-of-the-Year – International Information Issues (SIG/III) and Digital Libraries (SIG/DL)

New Officers and Directors Join ASIS&T Board

A new ASIS&T administrative year got underway during the 2007 Annual Meeting in Milwaukee, bringing two new faces to the Board of Directors and two familiar faces to new positions.

Each of the positions filled through recent balloting is for a three-year term. Those elected to the Board are Donald O. Case, president-elect; Vickie L. Gregory, treasurer, and Efthimis N. Efthimiadis and Barbara M. Wildeumth, directors-at-large.

As the new members took their seats, Nancy Roderer, elected last year as president-elect, assumed the presidency from Edie Rasmussen, who now serves as past president for one year. Former president Michael Leach, treasurer June Lester and directors-at-large Marianne Afifi and Donald O. Case completed their terms of service.

Nancy Roderer is associate professor at Johns Hopkins University, where she serves as director of both the Welch Medical Library and the Division of Health Sciences Informatics. Previously she worked in medical librarianship and informatics at Columbia University, Yale University and the National Library of Medicine, as well as serving as an information sciences consultant. Among the many highlights of her ASIS&T participation are service as a board member; as an officer of both SIGs and chapters; and on several committees. In addition, Nancy is the recipient of the 2003 Watson Davis Award.

Donald Case assumed his position as president-elect just as his three-year term as director-at-large came to an end. He is a professor in the College of Communication and Information Studies at the University of Kentucky, where he previously served as director of the School of Library and Information Science. He holds a Ph.D. in communication research from Stanford University and an MLS from Syracuse. Among his professional honors is the ASIS&T Best Information Science Book Award in 2003 for Looking for Information: A Survey of Research on Information Seeking, Needs and Behavior.

Vicki Gregory, completing her term as SIG Cabinet Director, is the new ASIS&T treasurer. She is a professor in the School of Library and Information Science, University of South Florida, and has served on the ASIS&T Budget and Finance Committee for the past four years. She has also served in many local and national positions with chapters and Special Interest Groups.

Efthimis Efthimiadis, associate professor in the Information School at the University of Washington, teaches in the areas of information retrieval, database design and web search, and he conducts research on user-centered design and evaluation of information retrieval systems. A longtime member of ASIS&T, he has served the Society in numerous ways on national committees, awards juries, conference committees and in chapters and SIGs. He holds a Ph.D. in information science from City University, London.

Barbara Wildemuth is a professor in the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, where she previously served as associate dean for undergraduate programs. Her research projects include a collaborative digital library curriculum development effort; a test of the feasibility of recruiting and training medical informationists; the Open Video project, examining people’s interactions with a digital video collection; and an assessment of people’s needs for personal health records. She holds a Ph.D. from Drexel University. 

Call for Papers for ASIS&T 2008
People Transforming Information – Information Transforming People
October 24-29, 2008
Columbus, Ohio

Much attention has been paid to the rapid growth of the Internet and the proliferation of information and to the development of technologies in response to these trends. If we view this changing landscape through a lens of the human and social condition, we would have a better understanding of how the needs of humans drive, are served by and change information and technology. We anticipate an exploration of the human condition from the individual to society as a whole.

ASIS&T 2008 will focus on how people transform information as well as how information transforms people. Submissions by researchers and practitioners are solicited on a wide range of human-centered approaches to topics including but not limited to the following:

• Individual identities and how they are transformed by the impact of information technologies
• The societal archive – is it disappearing and/or being marginalized?
• Societal attentions and how emphasis on information technology either allows or hinders these
• Openness, access and privacy issues
• Generational, economic and socio-cultural dimensions of the impact of information on people’s lives
• Cognitive and emotional aspects of interactions with information
• Reshaping the boundary between personal and public information space
• The effect of collective information creation on authority and trust
• Information by the people for the people
• The role of information in connecting people and community building
• How well is current technology meeting human needs, and what should future technology research and development involve to better meet our needs?

Types 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. These are generally reports of completed or well-developed projects on topics suitable for publication in scholarly and professional journals.

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.

Technical sessions 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 see the complete Call for Participation at http://asis.org/Conferences /AM08/AM08_cfp.doc

In Memoriam

Sue O'Neil Johnson (1939-2007)

Sue O'Neil Johnson, a librarian and information specialist, who was a friend and mentor to many international information professionals, died September 27, 2007. Sue's leadership, dedication and love for ASIST&T’s international role inspired many professionals from developing countries to join and participate in the Society's meetings and activities. She was twice the chair of SIG/III, and she won the ASIS&T SIG Member-of-the-Year in 2003.

Born in 1939 in Chicago, she later moved to Connecticut where she completed her bachelor of arts studies at Connecticut College and Boston University. She received an MLS degree from the University of Pittsburgh and a master’s degree in public administration from the American University in Washington, DC. Sue's professional career included work at the Library of Congress, among other institutions, and she spent 12 years at the World Bank as manager of the Information Technology Resource Center. After retiring in 2001 as a senior information projects officer, she was an international consultant in informatics. Her work included a study of the status of clinical trials throughout the world for the National Library of Medicine.

Sue's contribution to information specialists from developing countries is profound and is an example to other professionals. She devoted part of her career to training and mentoring information specialists globally during her tenure at the World Bank. Her focus was on using the bank's information management tools and databases to spread knowledge of best practices in economic and social development. She did this mission with keen interest and enthusiasm, and she inspired many information professionals to develop systems in different parts of the world. She co-founded the ASIS&T International Paper Contest and was instrumental in developing the ASIS&T International Travel Grants program to bring winners of the contest to the ASIS&T annual meetings. Among her other achievements was her leadership in raising the money to bring 25 librarians from developing countries to the global 2000 Special Libraries Association meeting in England, for which she received the National SLA President’s award.

Sue was musically talented, a gifted pianist and a composer. She founded a musical group in Lexington in the 80s, led a jazz trio in Washington, DC, and composed, among other works, a cantata for soprano and piano. In 2005, she produced a CD of nine of her original compositions.

– Bahaa Elhadidy on behalf of the ASIS&T Special Interest Group International Information Issues (SIG/III)

Bahaa Elhadidy can be reached at 16104 Stowe Court, Tampa, FL 33647-1147; email: Elhadidy<at>cas.usf.edu