Summer Elections Now Underway

Abstract

Each summer, ASIS&T members have the opportunity to elect new members to the Board of Directors. In the election process now underway, members will vote for a new president-elect, a new treasurer and for two directors-at-large for the Board.

Please note that all eligible voters should have received special instructions from ASIS&T executive director Richard Hill on how to access online ballots. If, for any reason, a member is unable to vote online or does not receive ballot information, please call ASIS&T headquarters at 301-495-0900 or email [email protected]. Votes must be received by June 15.

Candidates for president-elect for the 2017 administrative year are Lisa Given and Diane Rasmussen Pennington. Candidates for treasurer for a three-year term ending in 2019 are June Abbas and Michael Luesebrink. Candidates for director-at-large are Dania Bilal, Naresh Agarwal, Heather O'Brien and Hazel Hall. Two director candidates with the largest plurality will emerge as winners. Biographical information is included for all candidates below; additional information, including their position statements and goals for the office, is available at the ASIS&T website.

Lisa Given is professor of information studies and a research fellow of the Research Institute for Professional Practice, Learning and Education at Charles Sturt University (CSU). Prior to moving to Australia in 2011, Lisa was professor in the School of Library and Information Studies, University of Alberta (UofA). Lisa has served in university-level and national leadership roles, including as associate dean, research (Faculty of Education, CSU), as director, International Institute for Qualitative Methodology (UofA) and on the Australian Research Council's college of experts. A past-president of the Canadian Association for Information Science (CAIS), she also served as secretary-treasurer on the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) board. Lisa completed her PhD and MLIS at The University of Western Ontario. Her research explores individuals' information behaviors, focusing on technology use, with funding from the Australian Research Council, Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, and Canadian Institutes of Health Research. Lisa has served ASIS&T in many roles since joining in 1996. She is past chair of SIG/USE, serves as ASIS&T Chapter Assembly Advisor and is a founding officer of the Asia-Pacific Chapter. Lisa has delivered papers and panels at ASIS&T conferences and was chair of the 2015 Annual Meeting in St. Louis.

Diane Rasmussen Pennington (formerly Diane Rasmussen Neal) is lecturer (assistant professor) in information science at the University of Strathclyde in Glasgow, Scotland. She earned her MS and PhD in information science from the University of North Texas, and she was assistant professor at the University of Western Ontario. Diane has published more than 40 works and delivered over 80 presentations in the overlapping areas of information organization, social media, non-text information indexing and retrieval, and digital consumer health information. Diane was ASIS&T director-at-large from 2011–2014. She chaired the Web Presence Task Force, which led to the redesigned ASIS&T website in 2015. She co-chaired or chaired SIG/VIS from 2003–2008 and won the 2011 SIG Member-of-the-Year Award as the 2010–2011 SIG/CR chair. She was president of the Canadian Association for Information Science (CAIS) from 2013–2014.

June Abbas is professor in the School of Library and Information Studies (SLIS) at the University of Oklahoma, Norman campus. She obtained her PhD in information science from the University of North Texas in 2001 and taught in the Department of Library and Information Studies at the State University of New York in Buffalo from 2001–2008 before joining the SLIS in August 2008. She also held professional positions in public and special libraries. Her research focuses on the development of user-centered digital libraries, institutional repositories, and other knowledge organization structures. She conducts research on youth and their use of technology and the intersection between information behavior, information retrieval and structures for organizing knowledge. She teaches courses related to the organization of information and knowledge resources, cataloging and classification, indexing and abstracting, digital collections and digital information retrieval. She has also served as project manager on 10 digital libraries projects and on task forces to develop institutional repositories. Her book, Structures for Organizing Knowledge: Exploring Taxonomies, Ontologies, and Other Schema, was nominated for the ASIS&T Best Information Science Book award in 2011. She is currently co-PI on a Mellon-funded grant to develop a digital library for classics.

Michael Luesebrink is collection assessment librarian for the University Libraries at Florida State University where he has worked for the last 18 years. Before entering the LIS field, he studied accounting and became a qualified CPA candidate. He entered the library industry after earning his MLIS from San Jose State University. In addition, he holds a PhD in information studies from Florida State University. As an apprentice information practitioner, he worked as a contract archivist at Hearst San Simeon State Historical Archives and as a corporate librarian at Shaman Pharmaceuticals, a former biopharmaceutical company in San Francisco. At FSU, he has served the academic communities as public services librarian at Dirac Science Library and also as head of the Monographs Acquisitions Unit, responsible for and administering the various monograph library materials budgets. Since joining ASIS&T, he has become active working with the various SIGs. In 2015, he served as chair of SIG/STI, where he still serves as treasurer. Currently he serves as a SIG Cabinet Advisor.

Naresh Agarwal is associate professor, School of Library and Information Science at Simmons College, Boston. He earned his PhD from the National University of Singapore, Department of Information Systems, School of Computing. His teaching areas are technology and web development, evaluation, knowledge management and information science theories. Agarwal's research area is information behavior and knowledge management – the way people look for information and the contextual factors that impact their choice of information sources. He seeks to understand and synthesize the apparent contradictions in this phenomenon and tries to reconcile multiple perspectives. His publications span these areas. Prior to entering the doctoral program at NUS, he worked for six years in technology roles in the voice-over-IP, bioinformatics and digital cinema industries. Over the years, Agarwal has held various leadership positions at ASIS&T and is currently chair of the membership committee. He has also participated in a variety of ASIS&T panels and presentations, while contributing to ASIS&T publications as author/reviewer. In 2012, he was awarded the ASIS&T James M. Cretsos Leadership Award.

As the current Chair of the Membership Committee, he hosts regularly online meetings and is leading a number of initiatives – soliciting, collating and prioritizing ideas for member recruitment and retention, including surveying members and looking at the work done by sister societies; looking at patterns of membership data; collecting/aggregating data of ongoing events by student chapters, regional chapters and SIGs into a common monthly calendar; inviting doctoral students to submit their videos for the ASIS&T website; among others.

Dania Bilal is professor and interim director at the School of Information Sciences, the University of Tennessee, Knoxville. She obtained her PhD in library and information studies from Florida State University, School of Library and Information Studies in 1988. Since her appointment to the faculty in August 1997, she has taught courses in human-computer interaction, web mining, research methods, information systems design and implementation, and information access and retrieval, among others. Her research is at the intersection of information behavior, information retrieval and human-computer interaction with a focus on children. She has published work on children's use of web search engines, interaction with international digital libraries, conceptual structures and design of search engine interfaces, and she has compared their web information behaviors with the behaviors of adults. She has published two books, New Directions in Children's and Adolescents Information Behavior Research and Library Automation: Core Concepts and Practical Systems Analysis. Her co-edited book, Information and Emotion: The Emergent Affective Paradigm in Information Behavior Research and Theory received the ASIS&T SIG/USE Book-of-the-Year-Award in 2008. Her most recent research focuses on eye-tracking children's online reading behavior in the context of searching search engine results pages (SERPs).

Heather O'Brien is assistant professor at the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies at the University of British Columbia, Vancouver, Canada. She earned MLIS and PhD degrees at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. Her research and teaching interests relate to human information interaction, specifically how and why people engage with digital information systems and how to measure engaging user experiences. She developed the user engagement scale, which has been used extensively in various domains, and she has published in scholarly conference proceedings and journals, including JASIST. She has been a member of ASIS&T since 2005 and a regular contributor to the ASIS&T Annual Meetings as a presenter, session moderator and conference panels co-chair in 2015. She served on the awards and honors committee (2009–2010) and was the Special Interest Group/Information Needs, Seeking and Use (SIG/USE) awards committee co-chair (2013–2015). She is currently a member of the SIG/USE executive committee, serving as incoming chair for 2016–2017.

Hazel Hall is director of the Centre for Social Informatics at Edinburgh Napier University, Scotland. Her primary professional interests lie in information sharing in online environments. While her base is in Scotland, her perspective is international. She has strong ties through collaborative work with colleagues in North America and the Nordic countries. Alongside her research and teaching activities, she is Edinburgh Napier University's academic champion for gender equality in the workplace.

Although she has spent most of her career in academia, she has also taken advantage of opportunities to engage with practitioners, including corporate librarians in hi-tech firms in Silicon Valley, and knowledge managers in an international professional services firm. She notes with particular enjoyment her work leading the implementation of the UK Library and Information Science Research Coalition between 2009 and 2012, the impact of which has been felt at the level of individual careers as well as in major new initiatives, such as the recent launch of Library and Information Science Research Australia (LISRA).

The ASIS&T awards program continues to be among the most prestigious presenters of recognition for academic and research accomplishments in the field of information science and technology. The awards are presented at the Annual Meeting, but the process of getting there begins with the nominations for each award. Deadlines are rapidly approaching for nominations for this year's honors. Find full nominating information at www.asist.org/about/awards. But work quickly; here are the deadlines for this year's nominations:

June 15

June 20

July 1

July 15

As ASIS&T begins the process of hiring a new executive director to replace the retiring Dick Hill, the organization also plans to add a communications officer to the headquarters staff. The new position will go to an individual who can assist in the promotion and presentation of a consistent image of ASIS&T as a major association of international caliber. Among the duties will be developing and implementing communication strategies consistent with the Association's mission and objectives; providing internal and external communications regarding the Association's actions, membership affairs and services; building strong relationships with members, special interest groups, chapters, external organizations and communities of interest; and conducting campaigns to increase the membership of the Association.

The selected candidate will hold a master's degree in one or more of these fields: communications and media studies, public relations, marketing, education, library and information science, science and technology studies, sociology, information systems, information science or computer science or other related fields.

The candidate is hoped to have experience with web content management, social media, knowledge management, information architecture, user experience, digital asset management, graphic design and media software, as well as the ability to prioritize and manage several projects at once and to work well autonomously and as part of a team.

For full information about the position and the candidate sought, please see the full position description at www.asist.org/communications-officer/

On April 15, 2016, ASIS&T held the first of what is expected to be a series of regional meetings around the country. The first outing was the East Coast meet held at Rutgers University in New Jersey. The full-day program included a creativity workshop, a panel on library as community and a panel on wearable technology. After the fascinating substantive workshops presented by leaders in the field, the day concluded with a more ASIS&T-centric panel looking at best practices for growing and maintaining special interest groups and student and regional chapters throughout the ASIS&T organization.

Among the many speakers at the daylong workshop were ASIS&T president Nadia Caidi; chapter assembly director Chirag Shah; immediate past chapter assembly director Michael Leach; Denise Agosto, Drexel University; Adriana Blancarte-Hayward, New York Public Library; Fred Gitner, Queens Library; Vivek Singh, Rutgers University; and SIG/KM chair Tricia Bradshaw.

For a report on the event with links to some of the videos from the sessions, please visit www.asis.org/Chapters/nj/association-for-information-science-and-technology-regional-meeting/.

Doctoral students who are either in the writing stage or preparing for the defense of their dissertations are invited to showcase their research to a much wider audience!

Students who have completed their coursework and their qualifying examinations (or equivalent) and defended their proposals or are in the process of analyzing/writing or ready to defend their dissertations are invited to submit short videos (five minutes or less) to introduce their exciting and engaging research. The videos should be similar to elevator speeches in which the dissertation research, related to the broadly defined information field, is presented. Presenters are encouraged to be creative in the production of their concise and well-articulated videos.

Keren Dali is a new assistant professor at the School of Library and Information Studies at the University of Alberta, Canada. She joins the Alberta institution following a teaching stint at the University of Toronto iSchool, completing two years of postdoctoral SSHRC-funded research at Western University in Ontario and spending one year as a visiting professor at Queens College, New York. Her primary interests are in researching diversity and immigrant communities; reading practices in libraries and beyond; connections between information literacy and leisure behaviors; relationships between LIS and social work; and LIS education, with the focus on creativity and the issues of accreditation. She is an author and co-author of over two dozen publications in LIS and the recipient of numerous honors and awards for teaching and research. As an active ASIS&T member, she currently chairs the education and professional advancement committee for ASIS&T and participates in the Information Professionals Task Force.

Chirag Shah has been promoted to associate professor at the School of Communication and Information, Rutgers University, where he teaches in the department of library and information science and is also an affiliate member of the department of computer science. He received his PhD from the School of Information and Library Science (SILS) at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and a master's degree in computer science from University of Massachusetts, Amherst. Among his primary research interests is the study of interactive information seeking, especially in the context of online social networks and collaborations, contextual information mining and applications of social media services for exploring critical socio-political issues.

Shah has also received numerous awards and grants from federal agencies, including the just-announced award from the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS) 2016 National Leadership Grants for Libraries for a project, Online Q&A in STEM Education: Curating the Wisdom of the Crowd. The project received nearly half a million dollars in funding. Shah is currently Chapter Assembly Director on the ASIS&T board.

ASIS&T members received yet another of the 2016 IMLS leadership grants. Professor Iris Xie and assistant professor Rakesh Babu at University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee's School of Information Studies, along with their research team, received a half-million dollar grant to create digital library (DL) design guidelines on accessibility, usability and utility for blind and visually impaired (BVI) users. The guidelines will address the help-seeking situations in BVI users' interactions with DLs, incorporating perspectives from DL stakeholders and related guidelines. The project will also report on the current status of how DLs satisfy BVI users' help needs and support DL interactions and provide a methodology that can be applied to other underserved users to develop similar guidelines for DLs and different types of information systems. The project draws upon the expertise and experience of numerous organizations serving libraries, as well as organizations for the visually impaired.

Carol Tenopir, Dania Bilal and Rachel Fleming-May, School of Information Sciences in the College of Communication and Information at the University of Tennessee, received $811, 501 from IMLS for a grant to educate students in future careers in user experience (UX) and assessment. The grant will provide assistantships and co-curricular educational opportunities for 12 graduate students. Experience Assessment is an on-campus program that will begin in fall 2016. During the 42-credit hour program students will complete 36 hours of course work and 6 hours of field experience. Every student will receive travel assistance to attend professional meetings, specialized mentoring and workplace opportunities in UX and assessment. Each student will receive full tuition, medical benefits and an assistantship that includes a yearly stipend from fall 2016 through graduation in May 2018.