Annual Meeting Coverage

by Irene Travis, editor of the Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science

This issue of the Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science is devoted to coverage of the ASIS Annual Meeting, which was held in Washington the first week in November. It was very lively and quite well attended. In addition to news of awards and scenes of riotous living from SIG/CON and elsewhere, we are fortunate to be able to bring you other highlights. The coverage includes Eugene Garfield's forthright inaugural address from the Annual Business Meeting, track overviews and the ASIS Award of Merit winner's speech. Future issues will feature other material from SIG presentations. The editor is deeply grateful to the contributors, who graciously met a totally unreasonable deadline.

A further word is required about the track overviews. As many of you will recall from the preliminary program or from the meeting itself, this year's conference was divided into five tracks. Speakers introduced each track at the beginning of the conference and provided some further insight at the end. Given the short deadline and considerable latitude from the Editor, the resulting articles vary somewhat in their approach. For instance, some speakers reproduce their opening remarks and some take a retrospective view; some include more information about actual presentations than others. Each in its own way, however, is rewarding reading. The five tracks and speakers are

Track 1: Knowledge Discovery, Capture and Creation: Linda Smith, professor, University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign

Track 2: Classification and Representation: Jessica Milstead, principal, The JELEM Company

Track 3: Information Retrieval: Mathew Koll, founder of Personal Library Software and America Online Fellow

Track 4: Knowledge Dissemination: Donald W. King, King Research

Track 5: Social, Behavioral, Cultural and Ethical Factors: José-Marie Griffiths, executive director and chief information officer, Information Technology Division, University of Michigan, and Janice Keeler, Andersen Consulting

My thanks also to Steve Hardin for his coverage of the discussion session on the proposal to change the Society's name to the American Society for Information Science & Technology. .