ASIS&T Election of Officers and Directors: And the Winners Are….

Abstract

Summer balloting is complete for the annual process of selecting new leaders for the ASIS&T Board of Directors. And the winners, who will take their seats at the conclusion of the upcoming Annual Meeting in Copenhagen, Denmark, are Lisa Given, president-elect; June Abbas, treasurer; and as directors-at-large, Heather O'Brien and Dania Bilal.

Lisa Given, professor of information studies and a research fellow of the Research Institute for Professional Practice, Learning and Education at Charles Sturt University in Australia, based her presidential campaign on her interest in deepening and strengthen engagement with members across borders, broadening the membership base across disciplines and in practice, fostering research capacity building and research leadership and developing a structured knowledge management plan for sharing materials within and across ASIS&T units.

As president-elect, Given will spend the upcoming administrative year working with Lynn Silipigni Connaway of OCLC Research who will ascend to the presidency at the upcoming Annual Meeting.

June Abbas, professor in the School of Library and Information Studies (SLIS) at the University of Oklahoma, Norman campus, looks forward to her term as treasurer during which she will work to sustain the sound financial health of ASIS&T. The step into the treasurer's seat comes immediately upon completion of a term as director-at-large.

As a member of the Board of Directors, Heather O'Brien, assistant professor at the School of Library, Archival and Information Studies at the University of British Columbia, says she will support the ASIS&T strategic plan and its mission to provide focus, opportunity and support to information professionals and organizations around the world. And Dania Bilal, professor and interim director at the School of Information Sciences, University of Tennessee, Knoxville, wants to enhance the association's global perspective through establishing partnerships with professional associations in the Middle East, especially in countries without an ASIS&T presence.

As the new directors join the ASIS&T Board of Directors, the following people will transition off as their terms are complete: past president Sandra Hirsh, San Jose State University; treasurer Vicki L. Gregory, University of South Florida; director Lauren D. Harrison, Roche TCRC, Inc. As noted above, June Abbas is completing her term as director and taking her seat as newly elected treasurer.

The long-awaited 2016 ASIS&T Annual Meeting, the first to be held outside of North America, gets underway in just a few short weeks (depending, of course, on when you are reading this article). From October 14–18, Copenhagen, Denmark, becomes home base for the premier, peer-reviewed international conference of information scientists, practitioners and academics.

Creating Knowledge, Enhancing Lives Through Information and Technology is the theme for this year's gathering of the best and the brightest in the fields of information science and technology. Two plenary speakers will address the theme from different perspectives but with similar enthusiasm for the invaluable contributions our field is making to the world at-large.

Greg Welch, Florida Hospital Endowed Chair in Healthcare Simulation at the University of Central Florida (UCF), holds appointments in the College of Nursing, the computer science department and the Institute for Simulation and Training. He is also co-director of both the UCF Synthetic Reality Laboratory and the interactive systems and user experience research cluster at UCF. He will speak to the ASIS&T gathering on Bridging the Telepresence Valley.

Markus Bundschus, head of scientific and business information systems at Roche Diagnostics, brings to the ASIS&T Annual Meeting the insights of an insider in the field of biotechnology. Markus works on building bridges between industry and research and has been applying information and technology to create knowledge that contributes to the development of diagnostic tools.

In addition to these two plenary sessions, attendees will choose from among dozens of stimulating panel and paper sessions presenting cutting-edge research, applications, approaches and agendas that will continue to drive the field in the years ahead.

If you haven't yet secured your travel arrangements, do so now so you won't miss out on this historic ASIS&T Annual Meeting.

Peter Suber and other chroniclers of the open-access movement have noted that the open, online dissemination of scholarly and research material is reliant upon digital reproduction. Indeed, prior to our present age, Suber notes that all forms of non-rivalrous objects, such as knowledge, were tied to rivalrous modes of communication, such as paper. But is the digital age so different from the age of mechanical reproduction identified by Walter Benjamin early in the 20^th century? Why should new technological mutations drive the ways in which humanities scholars disseminate their work? And is there a danger in letting technological fetishism act as determiners of humanities scholarship?

In this upcoming SIG/AH webinar, professor Martin Paul Eve will address these matters, which are formative elements of the terrain on which scholarship in the 21^st century will emerge. Technology and Publishing: The Work of Scholarship in the Age of its Digital Reproducibility, featuring Martin Paul Eve from the Open Library of Humanities/Birkbeck, University of London, will be September 21, 2016, at 11:00 a.m.-12:15pm EDT. Access details will be available on the ASIST webinars site at www.asist.org/events/webinars/

Martin is the author of three books: Pynchon and Philosophy: Wittgenstein, Foucault and Adorno (Palgrave, 2014); Open Access and the Humanities: Contexts, Controversies and the Future (Cambridge University Press, 2014); and Password: A Cultural History (Bloomsbury, forthcoming 2016) and many journal articles. A strong advocate for open access to scholarly material, Martin has given evidence to the UK House of Commons Select Committee Inquiry into Open Access; served on the Jisc OAPEN-UK Advisory Board, the Jisc National Monograph Strategy Group and the Jisc Scholarly Communications Advisory Board; been a member of the HEFCE Open Access Monographs Expert Reference Group; and is a member of the SCONUL Strategy Group on Academic Content and Communications. Martin is also a qualified computer programmer (Microsoft Professional in C# and the .NET Framework) and is the author of the digital publishing tools meTypeset and CaSSius.

Diane Kelly, longtime ASIS&T member and an internationally known information sciences scholar, is the new director of the University of Tennessee School of Information Sciences (SIS). She begins on August 8. Most recently, Diane was at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill where she was a professor in the School of Information and Library Science. Her research and teaching interests focus on interactive information search and retrieval, information search behavior and research methods.

“Diane Kelly, one of the world's leading experts with respect to user evaluation of information retrieval systems, is an outstanding scholar/teacher, and we are excited to have her join us as the new director of our School of Information Sciences,” said Mike Wirth, dean of the College of Communication and Information. “Her world-wide connections and extensive grasp of the evolving and expanding fields encompassed by information sciences will provide SIS with the innovative leadership required to expand its interdisciplinary and transdisciplinary teaching and research mission and to confront the challenges and opportunities associated with the world's high-paced and fast growing knowledge economy.”

Among her many honors and awards, Diane was recognized by ASIS&T in 2014 with the prestigious Research Award. She also received the 2009 ASIS&T/Thomson Reuters Outstanding Information Science Teacher Award.

Doctoral students in the writing stage or preparing for the defense of their dissertations are urged to showcase their research to a much wider audience in the new ASIS&T Doctoral Student Showcase. Eligible students are those doctoral students who have completed their coursework, qualifying examinations (or equivalent) and defended their proposals or are in the process of analyzing/writing or ready to defend their dissertations. Submissions are short videos similar to elevator speeches in which the dissertation research, related to the broadly defined information field, is presented.

The producers of the best 20 submissions will win free one-year ASIS&T memberships or renewals. All vetted submissions will be featured on the ASIS&T website.

The deadline for video submission has been extended to September 1, 2016.

This initiative is co-sponsored by the ASIS&T Membership Committee, ASIS&T Education and Professional Advancement Committee and the ASIS&T Outreach and Engagement Task Force.

For more information or if you have any questions, please contact Iris Xie at hiris<at>uwm.edu