Inside ASIS&T

Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science & Technology, Oct/Nov 2006

ANNUAL MEETING 2006

AM Keynoter Studies the Physics of Online News

Albert-László Barabás, the first of two keynote speakers at the upcoming ASIS&T 2006 Annual Meeting, is a pioneer in the study of the World Wide Web as a complex network of interacting systems. In July, research that he and colleagues from Hungary conducted was the subject of a very engaging article in PhysicsWeb, the online magazine of the Institute of Physics.

To further examine the complexity of the WWW as a complex network, Barabás and his research partners looked into the physics of online news. The researchers developed a model to describe their vision of news sites and the news documents that they post. They then decided to study the visiting patterns of a popular news and entertainment portal to reconstruct the browsing patterns of some quarter of a million visitors over a one-month period.

In a nutshell, the researchers found that the half-life of a news document posted online is very short - on average just 36 hours after it is released. According to the PhysicsWeb article, "The short life of a news item - combined with random visiting patterns of readers - implies that people could miss a significant fraction of news by not visiting the portal when a new document is first displayed, which is why publishers like to provide e-mail news alerts. The results also show that people read a particular Web page not just because it looks interesting but because it can be accessed easily." The full article can be found at http://physicsweb.org/articles/news/10/7/3/1.

Barabás, the Emil T. Hofman Professor of Physics at the University of Notre Dame, will kick off the technical program of the 2006 ASIS&T Annual Meeting with a plenary address at 1:00 p.m., Sunday, November 5.

Susan Dumais, senior researcher in the adaptive systems and interaction group at Microsoft, will address a plenary crowd at 10:30 a.m., Wednesday, November 8. She is widely published in areas of human-computer interaction and information retrieval.

For more details about these speakers and the rest of the technical program, please visit the ASIS&T website at www.asis.org.

ASIS&T Membership Materials Go Multilingual

The ASIS&T Membership Committee, noting that the ASIS&T membership already comprises members from some 50 countries, has made information about the organization just a bit more accessible to information professionals around the world. At the ASIS&T website, people interested in joining ASIS&T or just learning more about the organization can access a two-page information sheet in any of eight languages.

Speaking on behalf of the subcommittee charged with creating these documents, Caryn Anderson, Simmons College, says the downloadable documents are available in Chinese, both Mainland and Taiwan versions; English; French; German; Portuguese; Spanish and Swedish. The documents resulted from the efforts of a variety of members who assisted in coordinating, editing, translating and designing the flyers.

Members of the membership subcommittee are Caryn Andersen, John D'Ignazio, Kris Liberman, Michel Menou, Ruth Vondracek and Amanda Wilson. Translators and reviewers were Nadia Caidi, Sergio Chaparro-Univazo, Mabrouka El Hachani, Miriam Figuiredo Veira da Cunha. Michel Menou, Christian Schlogel, Diane H. Sonnenwald, Imma Subirais Coll, Peishan Tsai Bentley and Yin Zhang. Gerry Benoit received special thanks from the committee for the design and for typesetting mastery in a multitude of languages.

The committee hopes to add additional languages in the future. If you're interested in providing a translation, please contact Caryn Andersen at icisc asist.org.

The two-page information sheets are available at www.asis.org/infosheets/.

New ASIS&T Officers and Directors to Take Seats

As this issue of the Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology goes to press, the deadline is approaching for all voting members of the Society to submit their ballots for the election of new officers and directors.

Running for the presidency of ASIS&T, to take office in November as president-elect, are Abby Goodrum and Nancy Roderer. Four candidates are vying for two available seats as directors-at-large: Andrew Grove; Sue O'Neill Johnson; Katherine McCain; and Julian Warner. The three-year terms of the two candidates with the largest number of votes will also begin at the conclusion of the upcoming ASIS&T Annual Meeting.

Roderer is an associate professor at Johns Hopkins University, where she serves as director of both the Welch Medical Library and the Division of Health Sciences Informatics. She has previously worked in medical librarianship and informatics at Columbia University, Yale University and the National Library of Medicine, as well as serving as an information services consultant. She is a long-time, active member of ASIS&T, beginning with her election as secretary of the then-new SIG/FIS at her first annual meeting. Highlights of her ASIS&T involvement include service as a board member, conference chair and recipient of the Watson Davis Award.