An analysis of the results of an electronic focus group indicated that members would like to attend programs with a research focus that applies to what they are doing in the workplace. In addition, the survey indicated that they valued networking at meetings. What do you think? Chapters were encouraged to post information on Chapters-L, the Chapters listserv that is enjoying only moderate success so far.

Special Pre-Conference Session for ASIS Members

For "early birds" the Leadership Development Committee provided a very well attended session on "What it Takes to Become a Successful Leader in ASIS". The title of the session should not have been so limiting. Lessons provided could apply to many aspects of our professional and personal lives. Some hints were just common sense. For instance, Candy Schwartz pointed out the importance of thanking people and giving recognition for a job well done. Nancy Routher pointed out that it is very important to know what has to be done and to have a job for everyone.

Suggested Follow-Up
Copyright Retention

In one interesting session that examined journal pricing publishing and copyright, Cliff Lynch, Executive Director of the Coalition for Networked Information, stated that he felt that author retention of copyright is not scalable -- and that it is a little frightening. He said that we must retain a system that is sensible. As you probably know, there is a court case now being appealed that deals with this issue. ASIS DVC Views invites comments on this position.

-Jacqueline Trolley
Chair, ASIS/DVC

Sessions of Note
Four sponsored by SIG VIS (Visualization, Images and Sound.)

Monday. Information Retrieval of Non-Textual Documents and IR Visualization. Uta Priss began the session with a novel approach for structuring information and providing access to spatial, hierarchical, and linear data using the same interface. Abby Goodrum discussed the implications of various forms of representation to developers of systems for moving image retrieval. James Turner examined the use of audio description for moving images, and identified useful characteristics of the procedure which might be used in a visual information retrieval system. Min Song investigated how users access information in a visualized document space utilizing BiblioMapper. Mark Rorvig presented results from a case study which successfully utilized stemmed feature vectors to recover the visual configuration of full text from TREC topic document subsets.

Tuesday. Does User Modeling Research Impact IR Systems Design? James Callan explained that systems builders are rarely aware of the work being done by user needs researchers and that the results of those studies seldom map out the implications of the work for system design. Amanda Spink focussed on the need for greater interaction and collaboration between workers in the two areas and expressed the need for researchers from the user needs community to extend themselves into systems design and application development by indicating explicitly how their research might impact system design.

Wednesday. Research on New Interfaces for Information Visualization. Gary Marchionini demonstrated systems built for the Library of Congress and the Baltimore Learning Community and pointed out that interfaces to support visualization must support both overviews of collections and surrogates as well as previews of documents and document features. Howard White and Xia Lin presented two maps created from the same author co-citation data and demonstrated the use of the Kohonen map as an interactive interface for both information visualization, as well as an information retrieval tool. Important and as yet unsolved design issues presented by Lin included: where to locate authors who publish in several subject areas, how many authors to display in an area, how defined to make boundaries between subject areas, and how detailed labels ought to be. Henry Small finished the session by noting that innovation often takes place at the interfaces between disciplines, so the ability to visually explore those boundaries is extremely important. Visualization issues include the need to see shifts in paradigms over time, to examine shifts that occur as you move from one domain or place to another, and the need for a mechanism to track topic transitions of authors reaching beyond their domains.

Wednesday. Theory and Practice in the Organization of Images and Other Visio-Spatial Data for Retrieval: From Indexing to Metadata. James Turner opened with a poster created at the University of Montreal which maps the world of visual resource collections. Brian O'Connor followed with a call for researchers to examine functional representations of images including typologies for narrative structure and emotive content. Andrew Gordon presented a system that makes a thesaurus available for support to browsing and searching of image collections. This is particularly important in light of the semantic ambiguity of images. Elizabeth Bellas described a number of issues that contribute to the creation of typologies at Corbis, including restrictions on sales and use. A second session addressed the role of metadata in the representation of images and image collections. Cliff Lynch, (presenting for Howard Bessar,) discussed the importance of administrative data for image collections in digital libraries. Abby Goodrum presented a case study from the formative stages of the Drexel digital museum project exploring metadata typologies for art and fashion collections. Myke Gluck examined the usability of geospatial metadata and Corinne Jorgensen closed with a conceptual overview linking the two sessions.

-Abby Goodrum
Program Committee
ASIS/DVC

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