I spent the last month immersed in an accreditation exercise for ALA as chair of a site team. No need to mention names but I come out at the end of this experience with determination to decline any further invitations. The process eats up the time of the chair starting several months before the visit [...]
The ACM/IEEE Joint Conference on Digital Libraries was held here in Austin with the School of Information as host, and by all accounts it proved a great success. Worries about attendance turned out to be unnecessary as over 270 people joined us for the week. The weather was hot, the venue cool, and Austin is [...]
While ACM trawls for attendees at its various conferences by offering cost reductions to registrants (a first?), and other conference organizers worry about attendee numbers, the annual SXSW bash here in Austin seems to be flourishing. SXSW is not your typical conference. In fact, it’s three conferences in one really, if you want to spend [...]
Yes, I’ve been quiet for a month, lots of other things happening. Most pertinent, I’ve had something of a cleaning of my personal editorial duties and resigned in the last few months from three editorial positions (Interacting with Computers, JASIST, and the Int. Journal of Digital Libraries) and mitigated that somewhat by joining the board [...]
I spent the best part of the last week in Columbus OH (decent weather, so-so food and service) at two back-to-back conferences, International Council for Knowledge Management (ICKM) and the annual ASIST bash. ICKM was an enjoyable new experience for me and while the schedule was punishing with 8am keynote addresses and almost as many [...]
I spent last week at the Society for Competitive Intelligence Professionals’ (SCIP) Annual Conference in San Diego. Now talk about a group with identity problems. However, unlike certain other info-professions, these folks are quite happy with ambiguity. The conference also seems to have some money since they waived registration costs for speakers, have real food [...]
Am just back from a very interesting workshop at CLIR where a group of about 20 people discussed the future of academic libraries, launching the discussion with a set of prepared essays from eight of us. Too much was discussed across the day to cover here, and there will be a summary of the event [...]
Registration is closing soon for what must now be the 9th summit (not bad for an idea that was supposed to be the basis of a one-off hot topic meeting for ASIST in Boston in 2000). I’ve not attended the last couple due to an over loaded conference and meeting schedule but I always enjoyed [...]
Just back from a fascinating presentation by Aaron Marcus on the importance of culture-centered design. He was a guest here of the ASIST Student Chapter at the iSchool and spoke for almost two hours with questions from the audience. His work leans heavily on Hofstede’s model of cultural dynamics, which he acknowledges has several weaknesses, [...]
The special issue of Information Research with the Proceedings of the CoLIS 2007 conference in Sweden has now been published. There’s a lot of interesting reading here but let me point to a couple of papers I like. The Talja and Hartel piece examining the concept of user-centeredness in the information literature is a worthy [...]