Barbara Kwasnik
Bio
Barbara H. Kwaśnik is a Professor at the Information School at Syracuse University, where she has taught in the areas of knowledge organization and research methods for the past twenty-plus years, and has served as director of the MSLIS and Ph.D. Programs. She has an MLS from Queens College, CUNY, and a Ph.D. from the School of Communication, Information and Library Studies at Rutgers University. Current research includes the issues of adapting classifications and the use of genre information for enhancing information retrieval.
She has served ASIST on the Board of Directors, various program committees, panels, and juries, including the most weighty of all, SIG/CON chair. Honors include the dissertation award, and the ASIST Outstanding Information Science Teacher Award. The heart of her involvement, however, has been as one of the founding organizers in 1990 of the award-winning series of SIG/CR Workshops on Classification Research, now going on their 21st year.
Statement
I joined ASIST in 1984 as a doctoral student. What drew me in forever was the kindness, generosity, and unassuming collegiality of the people I met. My ability to jump right in with helping organize the SIG/CR Workshops could only have happened in an organization that is flexible enough to allow fresh endeavors, and yet dedicated to the core values of mentorship and exchange at the personal level. And so, as President I’d like to: Find ways to keep us vibrant, diverse, and with high standards, but at the same time welcoming and accessible to academics and information professionals from across the board by focusing on exciting and useful annual meetings but also expanding beyond that into ways of staying in touch through new media and venues. I'd like to ensure that new and continuing members feel that this Society is pertinent to them in the same way it was to me -- a hub where it's the lifelong relationships among people that provide the most value. I'd like students and young professionals to think of ASIST as the "go to" organization to join as their core commitment. We should continue to find ways for them to make substantive contributions from the very start. We should also tap into the potential of our increasing number of retired members. They are, after all, who gave us our spirit and instilled our values. As well, we must continue supporting our growing international membership; what would make ASIST most useful to them? I propose a systematic review of sister organizations to find interesting intersections that we can exploit for mutual benefit and to help make our presence known in every corner of the information world. I’d like to see projects that specifically target the collaboration of researchers and practitioners to strengthen the bridges between research and practice. At the same time I'd like to renew our dedication to supporting the highest level of rigorous research so that our impact is both immediate and enduring. There are many organizations dedicated to all aspects of information research and practice, but our Society is unique. We have the history, the heart, and the right attitude. I’d like to keep the special ASIST spirit going and look forward to working with all of you towards this goal.
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Andrew Dillon
Bio
Andrew Dillon is the Dean and Louis T. Yule Professor of Information Science at the School of Information, University of Texas at Austin where he also holds appointments in Psychology and Information Risk & Operations Management. Formerly serving on the faculty of Indiana University and as Research Fellow of Loughborough University UK, he earned his Ph.D in 1991 from Loughborough and a Master of Arts (first class) from University College Cork in 1987. He has been a member of ASIST since 1995 and has served as Director at Large (2002--04), as editorial board member of JASIST (2003-08), as Program Chair for both the ASIST Annual Conference (2006) and the IA Summit (2002), as member of the Publications Task Force, as well as writing a regular column on IA for the ASIST Bulletin from 2001 to 2007. His research and teaching interests are in human-computer interaction, reading and writing, design, and creativity.
Statement
There are so many disciplines, conferences, and professional groups that now claim information as their primary concern that it is difficult to make sense of this field. As the terrains and professional responsibilities are contested, ASIST should lead the way in developing a more cohesive and unified base for the professions, where appropriate. Thus, I suggest some direct courses of action if elected President.
- ASIST should partner strategically with relevant groups such as the iCaucus, ALISE, ACM, ALA and SLA among others to frame a clearer identity for information science and to develop hiring, conference, and even accreditation processes that complement rather than compete with each other;
- We should truly demonstrate our determination to be international by examining our name, our conference locations and our membership structures to encourage and enable greater participation from outside North America
- Since we have been losing membership as traditionally construed, we should reach further to embrace membership in our affiliated groups within the IA, HCI and IR communities, and consider alternative forms of membership within the society.
- We should produce a set of public statements about our field, our profession and our value that speak directly to important issues of the day so as to move beyond our claims for importance to a demonstration of what benefits information science delivers to our world.
- We should provide sufficient support and infrastructure to ensure the active development and participation at national level of student chapters at all relevant schools.
I suggest respectfully that these are important issues for our society to address and they form the program for action we can pursue should I be the next president.
Sandra Hirsh
Bio
Dr. Sandra Hirsh brings 25 years of professional and academic excellence, coupled with significant corporate experience and research accomplishment, to her candidacy as an ASIS&T director-at-large. Hirsh is Professor and Director of the School of Library and Information Science at San Jose State University, where she guides the School’s fully online graduate programs that serve 2,400 students in 45 states and 17 countries. Hirsh leveraged her knowledge as an information professional to pursue career opportunities with leading global companies. As a senior user experience manager at Microsoft's Silicon Valley Campus in California, she developed products to meet user’s information-seeking needs, and as director of the Information Research Program at HP Labs, she investigated how Hewlett Packard researchers use and integrate information into their work. Her research focuses on information-seeking behavior and understanding the information needs of a broad spectrum of users, including children, historians, and engineers. She is the recipient of a National Science Foundation grant, and she holds five U.S. patents for her innovative design concepts for consumer web products. She holds a PhD from UCLA and a Master of Library and Information Science from the University of Michigan. Hirsh’s academic experience includes serving as an Assistant Professor for the School of Information Resources and Library Science at the University of Arizona and as an adjunct faculty member for the Information School at the University of Washington. Hirsh has served ASIS&T in many capacities since joining in 1994, including conference organizing committees and program planning committees, and as an industry track chair, practitioners track chair, posters chair, and a frequent conference presenter.
Statement
I would be honored to serve as a director-at large for ASIS&T and share my ideas, energy, and excitement. I strongly believe in the value ASIS&T offers members by bringing together the latest information science ideas, scholarship, and practice from around the world and across multiple disciplines. Areas I would like to focus on as director-at-large include: encouraging more students, information professionals, and scholars to consider membership earlier in their careers; continuing to broaden the association’s scope to be more international; and exploring new strategies to welcome members in information practice/industry as well as in academia so there is a good balance in the association. ASIS&T has been my primary professional and scholarly community throughout my career – as a doctoral student, professor, and while working in industry, and I am enthusiastic about serving ASIS&T as a director-at-large.
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Jens-Erik Mai
Bio
Jens-Erik Mai is Associate Professor in the Faculty of Information at the University of Toronto, where he previously served as Vice Dean and Acting Dean. Jens-Erik was formerly on the faculty at the Information School of the University of Washington where he also co-directed the Center for Human-Information Interaction; prior to that he was a faculty member at the Royal School of Library and Information Science, Denmark. He earned his Ph.D. in Library and Information Science from the University of Texas at Austin as a Fulbright Scholar and his Master and Bachelor degrees from the Royal School of Library and Information Science, Denmark.
Jens-Erik's research interests lie in the broad area of representation and organization of information; his current scholarship questions the conceptual foundation of classification and it seeks to establish an epistemological foundation that accepts the plurality of interpretations across communities. He has published on conceptual and methodological issues in the organization and representation of information; esp. about semiotics, theoretical frameworks, indexing theory, domain analysis, and cognitive work analysis. His most recent publications explore authority and trust in information organization systems and services, and contemporary classification theory's conceptual foundation in modernity. He teaches courses on representation of information, classification, design of controlled vocabularies, and the theoretical foundation of information studies.
Jens-Erik is past chair of the Classification Research SIG of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
(ASIS&T). He has chaired the Best Information Science Book Award jury twice, and been a member of the SIG Cabinet Steering Committee. He has served the International Society for Knowledge Organization as executive board member and is currently consulting editor of the Knowledge Organization journal. He was the co-chair for the program committee for the 2011 iConference is the general chair for the 2012
iConference.
Statement:
The information field is expanding tremendously these years; many schools are growing, demand for information professionals rises, information ideas and concepts have entered mainstream consciousness, new information problems arise on a daily basis, and the need for information centered inter-disciplinary discourse is higher than ever. ASIS&T is the central umbrella organization in the middle of this tremendous expansion, and should be a thriving and bustling organization. In the coming years, ASIS&T needs to continue its focus on the revitalization of the organization, by:
- expanding its international reach,
- exploring strategic alliances with other organizations in the information field,
- strengthening the annual conference’s depth and breadth,
- diversifying ASIS&T sponsored publications, and
- reconsidering its organizational structure.
The goal of these efforts should be to create a broad and inclusive organization that embraces to the entire scope of the information field as it looks today.
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Diane Neal
Bio
Diane Neal is an assistant professor in the Faculty of Information and Media Studies at The University of Western Ontario, and holds the permanent title of Visiting Scholar at The University of Sydney in Sydney, Australia. Since earning information science degrees (MS, PhD) from the University of North Texas, Diane has also held academic appointments at North Carolina Central University and Texas Woman’s University. Additionally, she has been a systems librarian and a corporate information technology professional. She has held prominent positions for the iConference (2009 Posters Chair), Texas Library Association’s Automation & Technology Round Table (2005-2006 Chair), and South Central Voyager Users’ Group (2002-2003 Co-chair). Information about her teaching and research is available at
http://bit.ly/fDmIsq.
ASIS&T has been central to Diane’s career since 2001. Currently, she is the 2011 Annual Meeting’s Knowledge Organization Track Chair, Webinar Task Force Chair, Information Science Education Committee Co-chair, a Chapter Assembly Advisor, a Bulletin Advisory Board Member, and a New Leaders Award Mentor. She has presented at or moderated over 10 sessions at Annual Meetings, and was 2008’s Posters Co-chair. She has multiple publications in the
Bulletin and JASIST.
Her ASIS&T commitment has been recognized with accolades and elected roles. In 2009, the Bulletin Special Section she guest edited won the Special Interest Group (SIG) Publication of the Year Award. She has actively chaired two SIGs: Classification Research (2009-2010) and Visualization, Images, & Sound (2003-2008). Also, she was a founding officer of the award-winning Carolinas Chapter (2007-2009), and chaired the North Texas Student Chapter (2003-2004).
Statement
As information science professionals, we try to stay up-to-date in our ever-changing field, but time and money are common roadblocks. ASIS&T leaders can help by expanding the Society's new webinar program, as well as by further supporting specialized activities within SIGs and Chapters. Additionally, in order to sustain and grow ASIS&T, we need to recruit and retain active new members innovatively, such as by providing virtual professional networking opportunities. We must also ensure that infrastructure, conferences, and publications meet members’ needs.
Having been a SIG leader, Chapter officer, conference organizer, student, practitioner, and academic over the last 10 years, I can provide fresh but informed perspectives as a Director-at-Large. Receiving this nomination has been the greatest honor in my career so far, and I am delighted about the possibility of serving ASIS&T’s diversely inspiring members on the Board. I believe in our Society, and will continue to strive for its continued success.
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John Unsworth
Bio
John Unsworth has been Dean & Professor at the Graduate School of Library and Information Science (GSLIS) of the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign since 2003; he also holds appointments as Professor in the department of English, and on the Library faculty. In 2008, John Unsworth was named interim Director of the Illinois Informatics Institute. He chaired the national commission that produced
Our Cultural Commonwealth, the 2006 report on Cyberinfrastructure for Humanities and Social Science, on behalf of the American Council of Learned Societies, and he co-edited the Blackwell
Companion to Digital Humanities (2004). From 1993-2003, he served as the first Director of the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities, and a faculty member in the English Department, at the University of Virginia. While at Virginia, he also organized, incorporated, and chaired the Text Encoding Initiative Consortium, guided the Modern Language Association's Committee on Scholarly Editions through a revision of its guidelines in light of electronic scholarly editions, co-edited an MLA volume on
Electronic Textual Editing, and served as President of the Association for Computers and the Humanities and later as the first chair of the steering committee for the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations. His first faculty appointment was in the English Department at North Carolina State University where, in 1990, he co-founded the first peer-reviewed electronic journal in the humanities, Postmodern Culture. His Ph.D. is in English, with a focus on American postmodern literature and scholarly communication, from the University of Virginia (1988).
Statement
I first attended an ASIS&T conference in 1992, in Pittsburgh, to present a paper on "Developing and Managing an Electronic Journal." The presentation was based on my experience as co-founder and co-editor of Postmodern Culture, the first peer-reviewed electronic journal in the humanities, established in 1990. Since then, my research interests have continued to focus on scholarly communication, digital humanities,
cyberinfrastructure, and the impact of new technologies. I have played a central role in developing the now-burgeoning field of digital humanities, and I chaired a national commission on cyberinfrastructure for the American Council of Learned Societies that resulted, among other things, in the National Endowment for the Humanities creating its Office of Digital Humanities. While at Virginia, I worked with the Press to develop and fund its electronic imprint, Rotunda, and I built the Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities into what was then the premier digital humanities center in the world—a place to which many current leaders in the field trace their roots. I also incorporated the Text Encoding Initiative as a non-profit membership organization, putting it on secure financial footing, and I worked with Harold Short at Kings College, London to establish the Alliance of Digital Humanities Organizations
(ADHO), which now includes two North American digital humanities associations, one European association, and will soon add new member organizations in Australia and Japan. I am currently at work with colleagues at Illinois, Michigan, and Indiana in setting up the HathiTrust Research Center, which will provide computational access to all of the materials that research libraries (including Virginia’s) have contributed to the Google Books project, as well as materials digitized under other programs. These billions of pages of text in nearly every language and discipline will be a transformational resource for the humanities, the social sciences, information science, and computer science, at a minimum. Were I to be elected ASIS&T Director at Large, I would be interested in helping ASIS&T maintain a sustainable financial footing, expand its international reach, and develop deeper connections to the digital humanities, especially as DH is represented in
ADHO. I also have significant and relevant experience in promulgating, organizing, and carrying out successful conferences: I have hosted the annual international digital humanities conference twice, and the iSchools conference once, and I am the chair of the conference coordinating committee for
ADHO.