Inside ASIS&T

Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, Aug/Sep 2006

Keynote Speakers Named for ASIS&T 2006

With the 2006 ASIS&T Annual Meeting quickly approaching, two big names in the field of information science and technology are making their plans to address plenary sessions at Information Realities: Shaping the Digital Future for All, November 3-8, in Austin. Texas.

Susan Dumais, senior researcher in the Adaptive Systems and Interaction Group at Microsoft Research, and Albert-László Barabasi, professor of physics at University of Notre Dame, will share their views of the information realities at their respective plenary sessions.

Dumais, who has been at Microsoft Research since 1997, focuses her work on human-computer interaction. Her work on search engines, in concert with John Platt of the Microsoft Signal Processing Group and David Heckerman of the Machine Learning and Applied Statistics Group, includes both the back end algorithms that make them go and the face that they present to the user. Her designs have been incorporated into the popular msn.com site.

Dumais is widely published in the areas of human-computer interaction and information retrieval. Her current research focuses on personal information retrieval, user modeling. Web search, text categorization and collaborative information retrieval. Her ASIS&T Annual Meeting plenary session is scheduled for Wednesday morning. November 8.

Barabísi, author of Linked: The New Science of Networks and co-author of The Structure and Dynamics of Networks, is noted for research into scale-free networks and biological networks. Barabási has been a major contributor to the development of real-world networks. His biggest role has been the introduction of the scale-free network concept and as a populariser of network theory. Among the network theory topics he has studied arcgrowth and preferential attachment, the mechanisms responsible for the structure of the World Wide Web.

Barabási's plenary session is scheduled for Sunday afternoon, November 5.

Conference Arrangements

Headquarters hotel for the 2006 ASIS&T Annual Meeting is the Hilton Austin, located at 500 E. 4th Street in downtown Austin. A reduced room rate has been negotiated for ASIS&T attendees, but reservations must be made by October 13, 2006.

News about an ASIS&T Chapter

The New England ASIS&T Chapter (NEASIS&T) has named two winners of its 2006 NEASIS&T Best Papers in Information Science award. Karie Kirkpatrick was honored for her paper, "OpenCourseWare: An MIT Thing?" Scott Salvaggio was cited for "Enhancing a Digital Sheet Music Collection." Both honorees are in the Graduate School of Library and Information Science at Simmons College. Each of them will receive up to $750 to help defray the cost to attend the 2006 ASIS&T Annual Meeting. The jury for the awards was chaired by Beata Panagopoulos and included Paul Aloisio, Marnret Branchofsky, Christine Connors and Ken Varnum.

News about ASIS&T Members

José-Marie Griffiths, former ASIS&T president and currently dean of the School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, has been selected to serve on the National Science Board, pending U.S. Senate confirmation. The 24-member board advises the president and Congress about national science and engineering policy and oversees the National Science Foundation.

Michael Buckland. former ASIS&T president and emeritus professor. University of California at Berkeley, is the author of Enuiniiel Goldberg and His Knowledge Machine, a 400-page biography of a chemist, inventor and industrialist who contributed to almost every aspect of imaging technology in the first half of the 20th century. According to Buckland and his publisher, history has not been kind to Goldberg. virtually removing his name from the annals of information science. But in Buckland's incredible telling, we see that Goldberg created the first desktop search engine, developed microdot technology and designed the famous Contax 35mm camera.

ASIS&T Members Tapped by dLIST

dLlST, a cross-institutional, subject-based, open access digital archive for the information sciences, has tapped the ASIS&T membership for its new team of editors. The online archive, whose focus expands the field to include archives and records management, library and information science, information systems, museum informatics and other critical information infrastructures, seeks to positively impact and shape scholarly communication in the field.

ASIS&T members named as editors of dLIST. and their specialty fields for the archive, are Charles W. Bailey, Jr., University of Houston Libraries, scholarly communication; Anita Coleman, University of Arizona: Marija Dalbello, Rutgers University, digital libraries and digital humanities; Fernando Elichirigoity. University of Illinois at Urhana-Chainpaign. science technology studies; Kristin R. Eschenfelder. University of Wisconsin-Madison, government information and social informatics; Paul Marly. Florida State University, museum informatics: and Soo Young Rieh. University of Michigan, information behaviors.