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Bulletin, February/March 2008


Annual Meeting Coverage


Award of Merit

ASIS&T Award of Merit to Donald H. Kraft

The Citation: Donald Kraft has played a pivotal role as editor of the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology over the past 22 years. Every field that has any association with information technology has undergone many dramatic changes in these decades. More than any other individual, Dr. Kraft has successfully negotiated these changes and shaped and advanced the field of information science and technology through his skilled and visionary leadership of the Journal.

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Donald Kraft and his wife Linda, joined by one of
their two daughters, appreciate the moment after
receiving the ASIS&T Award of Merit

Successive waves of information technologies have swept through information science: (pre-Internet) online databases, online library catalogs, the Internet, the World Wide Web, digital libraries, digital archives and the list goes on. Concurrently, successive waves of methodological practice, including dramatic swings from quantitative to qualitative research methods, as well as a series of hot topics such as user-centered design, information visualization, interaction design and information architecture have swept the field.

That JASIST continues to reign as a top-ranked journal in quantitative and qualitative assessments is a tribute to Dr. Kraft’s leadership. He has steered the journal into electronic publication and more than doubled the number of issues and quadrupled the number of pages published each year. Dr. Kraft’s editorship has been characterized by expanded international reach and receptivity to new approaches and areas of research.

Throughout his editorship, Dr. Kraft has had the vision to recognize these trends and encourage a very wide range of authors from many fields to publish in the Journal. He has thus promoted the formation, clarification and extension of the field of information science as we move through times of rapid and profound social and technological transformation. As a consequence of his leadership and considerable people skills, the Journal has grown substantially under his direction, bringing a wider understanding of the field to the discipline of information science.

His pioneering research has applied mathematics and logic to the very real problems of library management and information retrieval. Dr. Kraft has been in the forefront of defining and prodding the evolution of information retrieval through his own work and has championed information science in general through his enthusiastic voice and support for scholarly publication in the field.

It is our pleasure and honor to present the American Society for Information Science and Technology 2007 Award of Merit to Donald H. Kraft.