President’s Message January 2025
Halò (hello in Scots Gaelic)
In my first column of 2025, I would like to start by thanking Crystal Fulton for all her hard work in her Presidential Year. Those who had the pleasure of working with Crystal know that she is fun, caring, and committed, and we have been blessed to have her as ASIS&T President.
We are very fortunate to have a talented new team working to help us develop ASIS&T in exciting ways. Alongside Lydia we have several colleagues from Global Management Partners, namely Jonah Coronis (Member Experience Specialist), Megan Pfefferle (Associate ED), Marlo Russell (Membership & Communications Manager), Meghan Tompkins (Meetings & Education Manager), and Garrett Doherty who is known to many of you already and who will continue to provide support and leadership for our publications.
I start this column by talking about people as membership organisations such as ASIS&T only make sense if they are useful and relevant to its members. For many years, my hometown of Glasgow has had the slogan ‘People Make Glasgow’ and I am going to co-opt (steal) this to say that People Make ASIS&T. All of you, as authors, readers, audiences, scholars, committee members, chairs, reviewers, and jury members make the organisation we see as our research home. This year we will engage in two activities to help us ensure that ASIS&T is useful and relevant to you, and we seek your help in both.
In January-May 2025, ASIS&T will be rolling out a process to discover its organizational values. Organizational values are attributes that represent an organisation by describing those qualities it sees as important and characteristic for that organisation. Values guide our ways of interacting with each other, and they inform others of who we are and what we stand for. Our values will represent what we wish for ASIS&T and what we see as our distinctive attributes. They will influence our policies such as our code of conduct, influence our strategic planning, and inform our events and training.
What do we think are ASIS&T’s values: are we curious, are we bold, are we socially progressive, kind, enterprising, aspirational? We will be asking all SIG and Chapter Leaders to create a conversation with your SIG or Chapter around our values. The aim of these conversations is to provide platforms and conversation spaces to think about what values you see as relevant and descriptive of ASIS&T. This will help us understand how ASIS&T is seen by members and what kind of organisation you wish ASIS&T to be. By the end of February, each SIG and Chapter will be asked to submit a list of up to five possible values. All discovered values will be passed to a small working group who will shortlist a set of values which will then be offered to the ASIS&T membership for a vote. The final selection of our values will be made by the ASIS&T Board of Directors, informed by this vote. I am very grateful to Chei Sian Lee , Spencer Lilley, Ana Ndumu, and Shannon Oltmann who have agreed to take part in this working group.
The second activity is the development of our third Strategic Plan to cover the period 2025-2028. This process will be led by President-Elect Maria Bonn, working with Jaya Raju, Jennifer Campbell-Meier, Jesse Dinneen, Sanghee Oh, Anwarul Islam, Devon Greyson, and Lorcan Dempsey. We are grateful to all of these colleagues for leading on this very important activity. There will be many occasions for input into our strategy; please do give your voice and ideas.
Planning for the 88th ASIS&T Annual Meeting is in full flow. This year’s conference will be held in Washington, 14-18 November and the conference theme is Difficult Conversations: The Role of Information Science in the Age of Human-Centered Artificial Intelligence. Artificial Intelligence is arguably the most significant technological development that we have experienced since the introduction of the World Wide Web and promises (or threatens depending on your view) radical changes to many information activities and processes. ASIS&T authors have already been thinking deeply about AI and its implications and uses, and we can look forward to a highly productive meeting. The submission portal will open on 4th February with a deadline of 9th April 2025 for all submissions. We are very grateful to June Abbas as Chair of the AM meeting, Yuxiang (Chris) Zhao as Vice-Chair, and all the track chairs for their careful stewardship of this meeting.
You will see a new topic of interest in the Call for Proposals, namely Education & Learning in Information Science to incorporate the active and important research into Information Science Education conducted by ASIS&T members. Information Science has had a long and distinguished collaboration with the Learning Sciences and huge impact on education across disciplines and so this new topic is a very welcome addition to our areas of interest.
I am delighted that the Annual Meeting in 2026, after your voting, will be held in Bangkok, Thailand. This promises to be an exciting destination and one that will enable more people from the Asian region to attend their first meeting and join in our global dialogues. Once you have submitted your contribution for Washington, start on your submission for Bangkok!
People make ASIS&T, and we look forward to working with you to create a successful year for ASIS&T. Please reach out to me, members of the Board, Lydia, and staff with any questions, feedback, and suggestions. Looking forward to meeting you at ASIS&T events to hear about excellent Information Science research and impact. Thank you for all you do for our community!
Best wishes
Ian