Inside ASIST

Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, Dec 2001/Jan 2002

Annual Meeting Coverage

The December/January issue of the Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology traditionally contains in-depth coverage of the ASIST Annual Meeting, including reports on major technical sessions, full photographic and textual coverage of the winners of the ASIST awards and news of other relevant activities.

This year, however, the early November date of the 2001 Annual Meeting fell outside the production cycle for this issue of the Bulletin. Therefore, the bulk of Annual Meeting news will be included in the February/March 2002 issue.

In this issue, we have included the acceptance speech of the Award of Merit winner and two Hot Topics articles that the presenters were kind enough to provide in advance of their presentations. In addition, we are including the winners of the prestigious ASIST awards, but details and photographs of their honors will be included in the next issue.

New Officers and Directors Join ASIST Board

With the start of the 2002 administrative year, the ASIST Board of Directors welcomed four new members, each of whom will serve the society for three years. Those elected by the membership during the summer balloting are Trudi Bellardo Hahn, president-elect; Cecilia Preston, treasurer; and Andrew Dillon and Abby Goodrum, directors-at-large.

As the new members took their seats on the ASIST Board, Donald H. Kraft, elected last year as president-elect, assumed he presidency from Joseph A. Busch, who now serves as past president for one year.

Kraft is professor in the Department of Computer Science, Louisiana State University, and editor of the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.

Hahn is manager of Library User Education Services and adjunct professor at the College of Information Studies at the University of Maryland. Previously, she has held positions with the Maryland State Department of Education, the Special Libraries Association, Catholic University and the University of Kentucky. Among her contributions to ASIST have been chairing the just-concluded 2001 Annual Meeting (Washington, DC), as well as the 1983 Mid-Year Meeting (Lexington, KY); chairing several ASIST committees and Special Interest Groups; serving as Directorat-Large on the Board of Trustees; and chairing numerous juries for awards, papers and scholarships.

Preston is the senior managing partner at Preston & Lynch, a consulting firm established in 1995, with clients that include libraries, museums, standards bodies and others interested in the use of technology to distribute information. Prior to that she was the principle in Strategic & Competitive Research of Palo Alto and Ventura, CA, and has held positions in both corporate and academic libraries. In ASIST, she has held positions in the San Francisco chapter; on Annual and Mid-Year program and local arrangements committees; as editor of the Proceedings of the ASIST Annual Meetings; and on several national committees and awards juries. She is also the co-author with Clifford Lynch of a chapter in the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, and they are currently working on an upcoming chapter.

Goodrum is assistant professor in the School of Information Studies at Syracuse University. She was formerly at Drexel University, where she taught courses in visual information retrieval, knowledge management and information architecture. Prior to beginning her academic career, she was a librarian for Cable News Network. Active in ASIST since 1991, she has served on the SIG Cabinet Steering Committee and SIG Cabinet Advisory Board and on several committees and awards juries. In addition, she has chaired four Special Interest Groups and contributed numerous panels and presentations to ASIST meetings. She was the winner of the Doctoral Dissertation Proposal Scholarship in 1996.

Dillon is an associate professor of information science at Indiana University where he serves as Director of the IU Program in HCI and holds adjunct faculty positions in Computer Science and Instructional Systems Technology. Beginning in January 2002, he will serve as dean of the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at the University of Texas at Austin, with adjunct professor positions in psychology and management science and information systems. He is currently co-editing a special issue of the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST) on information architecture. In addition, he writes a regular column on information architecture for the Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology.

As the new Board of Directors went to work in Washington, DC, at the conclusion of the 2001 Annual Meeting, the service of those leaving the Board was acknowledged. Eugene Garfield, immediate past president; George Ryerson, treasurer; and Gary Marchionini and Victor Rosenberg, directors-at-large, were thanked for their distinguished efforts on behalf of the Society and its membership.