From Your Executive Director, July 2024

Dear Colleagues,

It seems like we just left London and the 2023 Annual Meeting yet here we are in the throes of preparations for Annual Meeting 2024. This is the time of year when our attention turns from awards and selecting meeting content to the exciting process of registering attendees and making final preparations. October 25 will be here before we know it!

We are very excited for Annual Meeting 2024 in Calgary. With a total of 249 accepted submissions and 303 presenters, we are confident that this year's meeting will rival AM2023 in London for attendance and excitement. In addition to the outstanding presentations from your colleagues, you can expect two high powered keynote speakers to bookend the conference. And, of course, you don't want to miss the networking. There will be plenty of receptions and coffee breaks to keep you fed and connected with colleagues. If you haven't done so already, be sure to register right away to get the best rates. The cost of attending will go up on August 6th.

We just concluded our annual membership renewal cycle and we are sad to have lost about 30% of our membership to non-renewal. While this number seems shocking, it is pretty typical for us, and many of those members will come back once they realize they didn't renew. So please double check your own membership (you can do this by logging into the website) to make sure it's active, or email pyonker@asist.org if you're not sure. It's easy for us to reactivate you if you've let your membership lapse, but you do have to go in and rejoin all of your SIG and Chapter selections.

ASIS&T is excited to announce a new educational offering. At its April strategic planning retreat, the Board of Directors decided to initiate an annual ASIS&T President's Lecture. This event, which will be delivered via Zoom, will be open to all and provide an opportunty for those that are unable to attend the Annual Meeting to hear from a leader and visionary in the information science. The first ASIS&T President's Lecture will take place at 10 am ET on September 19. More details are available HERE.

Another area of focus that came out of the spring Strategic Planning Retreat is a renewed focus on our Institutional Memberships. In addition to offering substantial membership benefits, Insitutional Membership also offers institutions a way to promote themselves to prospective students. At the Annual Meeting, institutional members receive free access to the ASIS&T job fair. And for the first time, we will be hosting a gathering of instiutional member representatives where they can discuss issues of shared interest or concern. See elsewhere in this newsletter for more information.

In addition to all of the above, we're also hard at work closing out one fiscal year and starting another. The financial audit will begin in August and results will be shared at the Annual Meeting. Chapters and SIGs will be reporting their annual activities in a few weeks. And the Board will be voting on July 29 on two SIG-related proposals, one to expand SIG-DL into SIG-LIB to encompass the interests of all forms of libraries and the other to merge SIG-ED with SIG-Infolearn in the interest of combining a focus on teaching and learning to further ASIS&T's members interests in Information Science education in all forms.

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