Bulletin, December/January 2012


Bulletin Editor, Irene TravisEditor's Desktop

Irene L. Travis, Editor

Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology

Bulletin@asis.org

Couldn’t be in New Orleans? Join the fun anyway as we report on the awards and other activities from the 2011 Annual Meeting in Inside ASIS&T. In addition we have Gary Marchionini’s acceptance speech for the Award of Merit. Gary, who began his professional life as a mathematics educator, views information science as being primarily about relations, drawing on this central mathematical concept for his inspiration. Finally, completing our Annual Meeting coverage in this issue, we have Diane Sonnenwald’s inaugural address. Diane is the first ASIS&T president based outside North America, and she has many important things to say about continuing the Society’s work on becoming an international organization. Among other things, she proposes to change our name to the ASsociation for Information Science & Technology, retaining the acronym, but expanding the scope. She also announces projects to plan annual meetings that allow more international participation and to review our by-laws and procedures to identify North American biases that create unintended difficulties for other members. 

Additional Annual Meeting coverage will follow in our next issue of the Bulletin with reports on the two plenary sessions.

The special section in this issue also has a connection to the Annual Meeting, in particular, to the Workshop on Knowledge Management of Social Networks sponsored by SIG/KM. Heather Pfeiffer and Emma Tonkin, guest editors for the special section, have prepared some thought-provoking articles in this emerging area with emphasis on individuals managing their personal and professional faces on the web and on privacy issues. However, it also includes some other very engaging material, such as an analysis of what kind of information was “tweeted” and “retweeted” on the social network Twitter during the London riots this past summer. The challenges in managing information on social networks affect all of us at a very personal level, and I’m sure you will find much that is useful in this collection. My thanks to Heather and Emma for their extensive efforts to bring this material to us.