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Bulletin, June/July 2009


Bulletin Editor, Irene TravisEditor's Desktop

Irene L. Travis, Editor

Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology

Bulletin@asis.org

Editor’s Desktop
One of the joys of being all digital is that color images no longer break the budget of the Bulletin. We can now do justice to topics like visualization and visual search, which are the subjects of this month’s special section sponsored by ASIS&T Special Interest Group/Visualization, Images and Sound (SIG/VIS). Guest editor Diane Neal has assembled five articles under the general heading: Visual Representation, Search and Retrieval: Ways of Seeing, including contributions on visual search, visualization services in libraries, film analysis and visualization in self-surveillance. They range from reports of current projects in libraries and archives to speculation about the future of image metadata and search technology. Since there are few areas of research in our field that are as important and challenging as working with images and visualizations, we hope you will find something here that is interesting and inspiring.

Another major challenge is the change in cataloging theory, practice and systems that will result if libraries adopt Resource Description and Access (RDA), the proposed replacement for the Anglo-American Cataloging Rules (AACR). Shawne Miksa, who is the current chair of the American Library Association’s RDA Implementation Task Force, compares the approach taken by the two codes and suggests topics for further research generated by the adoption discussions.

Turning to the interests of ASIS&T itself, ASIS&T president Donald Case reports on recent Board decisions about the future of ASIS&T publications in his President’s Page. Phillip Edwards, one of this year’s James Cretsos Leadership Award winners, discusses the responsibility of the Society in developing its future leaders.