Eight SIS Faculty Active at ASIST Annual Conference

SIS faculty played an integral leadership role at this year’s annual conference of the American Society for Information Sciences and Technology (ASIST) held October 19-25 in Milwaukee. ASIST is the world’s leading research society for information scientists working in academia and industry.

As a Board of Director for ASIST, Suzie Allard had a wide variety of responsibilities, including attending some 17 sessions, and acting as liasion for the board with multiple committees including Membership and Rules and Bylaws.

Peiling Wang’s “Information-seeking behaviors of academic researchers in the Internet Age: A user study in the United States, China and Greece,” was selected as the runner up of the 2007 Special Interest Group (SIG) Information Needs, Seeking and Use (USE) for the Best Information Behavior Conference Paper Award. Dr. Wang presented “Emerging Trends” Modeling Web Session Behavior Using Cluster Analysis: A Comparison of Three Search Settings.” Dr. Wang also attended a SIG USE planning dinner and the Editorial Board meeting of the journal, Library and Information Science Research. Dr. Wang and Lei Wu, a CCI doctoral student, co-presented “Mining Web Search Behaviors: Strategies and Techniques for Data Modeling and Analysis.”

Meanwhile, Dania Bilal signed copies of her latest co-edited book, Information and Emotion: The Emergent Affective Paradigm in Information Behavior Research and Theory, which was promoted by the publisher, Information Today. Dr. Bilal hosted the SIG USE welcome reception, attended the International Relations committee meeting, the student chapter meeting, and hosted a poster session and paper with Dr. Mehra entitled "International Students’ Information Needs and Use of Technology.” Dr. Bilal organized, moderated, and presented a paper titled “Information Behavior in Developing Countries: Research, Issues, and Emerging Trends.” She also presented “Information Behavior in the Arab World” based on research co-authored with Lokman Meho.

Carol Tenopir presented “The Impact of the Internet on Users,” attended the Publications Committee, and was a faculty mentor at the doctoral mentoring program.

Bharat Mehra made three notable presentations: “Conceptualizing Social Justice in the Information Sciences” and “Information Behavior in Developing Countries: Research, Issues.” Dr. Mehra also co-led a panel presentation “Human Information Behavior Concepts from a Perspective of IT Professionals in India” and conducted a technical session entitled “Conceptualizing Social Justice in the Information Professions.”

SIS Director Ed Cortez contributed to important committees related to graduate education, hosted the SIS alumni reunion and held several meetings with the School’s national and international partners. His major concentration at the conference related to faculty recruitment.

SIS Lecturer Denise Bedford, the Senior Information Officer at the World Bank, was a panelist at the session on “Knowledge Organization Systems Standards Committee.”

Finally, SIS faculty hosted several poster sessions while at ASIST, allowing them to discuss the key points of their research in a highly interactive environment.

Lorraine Normore and SIS student Michelle Garrett (absent) presented “Models of information organization: A case study.” Robert Sandusky, Carol Tenopir, and SIS Lecturer Margaret Casado (absent) presented two poster sessions: “Uses of Figures and Tables from Scholarly Journal Articles in Teaching and Research,” and “Figure and Table Retrieval from Scholarly Journal Articles: User Needs for Teaching and Research.” Bharat Mehra and Dania Bilal presented “International Students’ Information Needs and Use of Technology.”

Robert Sandusky presented a poster at the SIG for Social Informatics pre-conference symposium with collaborator Jane Crowe entitled “A Web 2.0 enabled content management system for rural youth photographers: Social computing supporting community empowerment.” Sandusky also participated in the SIG Education and SIG Social Informatics planning meetings.