From Your Executive Director, September 2024

Dear Colleagues,

What an exciting time it has been here at ASIS&T Central! Today I had the pleasure of orienting our new incoming Board Members, Lu An and Timothy Dickey, and immediately after that we had the ASIS&T President's Lecture with David Lankes. What a great presentation that was! At the end he issues a call to action to ASIS&T and all information science professionals. If you missed it, not to worry! You can watch it HERE.

You won't be surprised to learn that much of what we are up to these days at ASIS&T has to do with the Annual Meeting which starts six weeks from tomorrow! Registration currently sits around 450 people and our fingers are crossed that those who haven't gotten their visas approved yet will get good news in the next few weeks. It promises to be a fabulous meeting with outstanding content and networking opportunities. We will see the launch of the Canada Chapter which is hosting a welcome reception for all Canadian attendees of the meeting.

The other big news from ASIS&T is the announcement I made last week about our transition from a stand-alone staffing model to an Association Management Company model. I heard from a couple of people that they were sceptical that this was a positive choice we were making (as opposed to one borne out of crisis). I can assure you that it is the former. We are in a great financial position as evidenced by the fact that our draft audit inticates an increase of more than $60k in reserves in FY24. A final audit will be available for your perusal at the Annual Meeting. I have also heard from some of you wondering what this transition means for me. My relationship to ASIS&T does not change. I will still be under contract to the Board of Directors and answerable only to them. I will continue to be an employee of ASIS&T and will lead the staff. However, the staff I lead will be employees of Global Management Partners. Two of the GMP staff who will be working with ASIS&T in the future will be at the Annual Meeting so will be on hand to answer any questions you may have. You can read more about this transition HERE.

Other exciting events that have happened at ASIS&T recently include changes to several of our SIGs. SIG-Education (ED) and SIG-Information & Learning Sciences (InfoLearn) merged into the new SIG-EduLearn which combines the scope of the two prior SIGs. And SIG-Digital Libraries (DL) has expanded its scope to become SIG-Librarians/Libraries (LIB). We beleive these changes will benefit the members of all of these SIGs as new resources and engagement will be available to them.

We are gearing up for a new Strategic Planning effort that will be led by incoming President-Elect Maria Bonn and will launch at the Annual Meeting. Maria is currently forming her Task Force and hopes to hold some focus groups at the Annual Meeting, particularly with doctoral students. If you are a doctoral student interested in giving input to the strategic plan and attending the Annual Meeting, please reach out to me so we can be sure to include you.

Finally, you'll see in the Governance report that the Board has tasked the Governance Committee with developing a bylaws revision that would move us from contested Board elections to a single slate election process. This is widely accepted as best practice in the association industry as it allows for thoughtful succession planning of the association leadership. More to come on that!

Though we are busy here at ASIS&T Central, we're never too busy to engage with our members. We hope you'll reach out and let us know how we can be of service to you. I hope to hear from many of you soon and see you in Calgary in October.

All the best,

Lydia