ASIS&T Summit Season Upon Us

The 16^th Annual IA Summit and the 7^th Annual RDAP Summit are resting on the May horizon, ready to bring together their respective communities of practitioners, researchers, teachers and students for a look at the latest news from their fields. Each group meets in Atlanta beginning on May 4 at the Omni Atlanta Hotel at CNN Center.

The 16th IA Summit will focus on digital spaces that are becoming ever-more interactive and less page-based. Cross-channel, data-dependent, multi-platform, context-aware content has become the norm. New technologies like internet of things devices and voice-driven gadgets continue to capture our imagination and fuel innovation across industries. In this environment, the intentional design of information environments for findability, understanding and adaptability has never been more important.

Today, everyone who contributes to the creation of these spaces needs to understand information architecture. Information architects are part of an ever-growing landscape of roles responsible for structuring information spaces. As technology evolves, so must the practice of information architecture.

The 2016 IA Summit will gather a diverse collection of voices from within the discipline and beyond to address the continued evolution of IA practices. With material appropriate for all levels and running the gamut from the theoretical to the immediately practical, the 2016 IA Summit will truly showcase a broader panorama.

Following two days of optional pre-conference workshops, the full three-day schedule will begin on Friday, May 6, and continue through Sunday, May 8.

For full details on the 16^th Annual IA Summit, please visit the website at www.iasummit.org/about.

The RDAP16 Summit caters to the interests and needs of data managers and curators, librarians who work with research data, and researchers and data scientists. Practitioners and researchers from academic institutions, data centers, funding agencies and industry will attend the Summit. They represent a wide range of disciplines from the life sciences, physical sciences, social sciences and humanities.

Among the panel session titles in the two-day main program, May 4–5, are Engaging Liaisons, Sustainability, Building the Research Data Community of Practice and How Are We Defining Success? In addition to panel sessions, attendees will enjoy poster sessions, lightning talks, roundtable discussions and numerous networking opportunities during social events.

RDAP16 will close with a two-day Data Carpentry Workshop on May 6 and 7, for which separate registration is required.

For full details of RDAP16, please visit the website at www.asis.org/rdap.

For the first time ever, the ASIS&T Annual Meeting is heading to Europe for an exploration of Creating Knowledge, Enhancing Lives Through Information & Technology. The ASIS&T Annual Meeting has, for more than 75 years, been a premier, peer-reviewed international conference that gathers scholars and practitioners from around the globe to share research, innovations and insights regarding how information and technology mediate the creation and use of knowledge within and across cultures and enhance lives.

This year in Copenhagen, October 14–18, the ASIS&T Annual Meeting will emphasize the internationalization of both the field of information science and technology and the association devoted to it. Conference planners are awaiting final submissions for paper and panel presentations. In the meantime, they have announced the keynote speakers.

The first plenary speaker on Sunday, October 16, is Greg Welch of the University of Central Florida. Welch holds the Florida Hospital Endowed Chair in Healthcare Simulation with appointments in the College of Nursing, 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 & User Experience Research Cluster.

Welch conducts research in virtual and augmented reality, human-computer interaction, human motion tracking and computer graphics and vision, with a focus on healthcare related applications. Welch has co-developed systems for healthcare training and practice, including physical-virtual patient simulators, and systems for 3D capture and display of patients for remote medical consultation. He has co-authored over 100 publications and is a co-inventor on multiple patents.

Then on Monday, Markus Bundschus, head of scientific and business information services at Roche Diagnostics in Penzberg, Germany, will address the conference. For decades, scientists in Penzberg have researched, developed and produced new biopharmaceutical ingredients (biologicals) as well as diagnostics. People often underestimate the importance of diagnostics, but they are the basis for the doctor's choice of treatment. The path to a successful diagnostic tool is simpler than the path to an effective medication, but it is still a long lasting puzzle.

Markus is keen 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 for this major biotechnology company. His research interests include data science, machine learning, data mining, information retrieval, bioinformatics, semantic web, text mining and document modeling. He has served as an external reviewer for several journals and conferences. Marcus is a member of Pharma Documentation Ring, a think tank of information and knowledge management professionals representing major research-based pharmaceutical companies.

A block of rooms has been reserved for AM attendees at the Crowne Plaza Copenhagen Towers. Several international airlines have attractive rates from the United States to Denmark. All ASIS&T members are encouraged to begin planning their trips now. Such planning will also include checking on visa requirements that might exist for travel from one's home country to Denmark.

Stay current on plans and activities for the 2016 ASIS&T Annual Meeting with regular visits to the ASIS&T website: www.asist.org/events/annual-meeting/annual-meeting-2016.

In February 2016, the ASIS&T Board of Directors, on behalf of the entire organization, issued the following statement in support of the ALA accreditation process.

As a professional association that bridges the gap between information science practice and research, ASIS&T counts researchers and practitioners from a large number of diverse fields in its ranks, including information science, library science, computer science, management, and education. The ASIS&T membership is also enriched by the contribution of members who deal with information in other fields, such as law, medicine, linguistics, chemistry, humanities, history, and engineering, to name just a few. ASIS&T's inclusive and evolving character reflects the current state of the information field, and its international and diverse membership plays an ever more important role in shaping the future of the field. As such, ASIS&T is concerned with the education of information professionals and with the accreditation process of Library & Information Science (LIS) programs by the American Library Association (ALA). ASIS&T's ongoing interest in and commitment to professional education is supported by the Education & Professional Advancement Committee, which is charged with reviewing accreditation guidelines for LIS programs and monitoring accreditation changes.

Increasing interdisciplinarity and the imperative of creativity and innovation propel us in the direction of collaboration and partnership. With the field of information both composite and diverse, the development of accreditation standards should be a shared responsibility and a collaborative undertaking of several professional associations. ASIS&T is strategically positioned to contribute to the improvement of the accreditation process and, more specifically, to the development of more accurate and inclusive accreditation standards. ASIS&T's extensive international reach and disciplinary diversity translates into a valuable contribution to the development of accreditation standards, which in turn reflects the dynamic nature and evolving educational expectations in the field. In this regard, ASIS&T makes the following statement.

It is imperative that accreditation standards be comprehensive and flexible enough to accurately represent educational requirements in multiple information fields, both in and outside of libraries, archives, and other longstanding information organizations. Accreditation must reflect the eclectic, diverse and pluralistic nature of the information field and must be fully applicable to an array of information professions. As a result, we call for the ongoing dialog between ALA and ASIS&T on accreditation issues.

The bedrock of professional education and professional accreditation is a fusion of values, ethics, and specific competencies. The latter includes field-specific knowledge and skills (e.g., computer science, library science, digital humanities) and transferable skills and attitudes (e.g., critical thinking, leadership abilities, creativity, problem solving, and so on). While the field-specific knowledge base varies from information field to information field, we call on ALA to recognize the commonality of professional values, ethics, and transferable skills in discussion and revisions of accreditation standards.

ALA has always conducted the accreditation process with the goal of “assuring quality, innovation, and value in library and information studies education” (http://www.ala.org/accreditedprograms/home). It is in the spirit of supporting this goal and the desire to take active part in this process that the ASIS&T statement is made.

ASIS&T Special Interest Group/International Information Issues (SIG/III) is accepting submissions now for its 16^th International Paper Contest for library and information science professionals in developing countries. Writers are encouraged to discuss the impact of their research on industry, government, local/national/global community groups, individuals and other practice contexts. All papers should speak to the ASIS&T Annual Meeting theme of Creating Knowledge, Enhancing Lives Through Information and Technology.

The winning submission will entitle the paper's principal author, who must be a citizen of and reside in a developing country, with a two-year individual membership in ASIS&T. In addition, depending on successful SIG/III fundraising activities, the winner will receive a minimum of $1000 to help offset costs of attending the 2016 Annual Meeting in Copenhagen.

A three-member panel of judges will select the winners. Judges are Innocent Awasom, Texas Tech University; J.K. Vijayakumar, King Abdullah University of Science and Technology, Saudi Arabia; and Maqsood Shaheen, IRC, U.S. Embassy in Islamabad. Deadline for submission of papers is May 31.