EDITOR'S SUMMARY During a panel at the ASIS&T 2016 Annual Meeting in Copenhagen, attendees discussed European perspectives on the world of information science. The presentations and discussions took European contributions and views on information science and contrasted them with those of the United States. Niels Lund discussed the Nordic Library and Information Science (LIS) and the impact LIS had on education in Denmark starting in the 1980s. Julian Warner talked about the invention of the telegraph and differing opinions on intellectual property in databases between the United States and Europe. Fidelia Ibekwe-SanJuan highlighted the development of information science in continental Europe and talked about coining terminology to better unify information standards across Europe. Michael Buckland discussed the history of documentation and neo-documentalism and the European influences in that field. Isabella Peters closed the presentations with a sample of opinions on information science from the European Chapter of ASIS&T.
EDITOR'S SUMMARYStandardization is fundamental for bringing a vast variety of electronic records under control. It enables capturing and preserving original records as well as evidence of any access or change to the records. Creating standards within and across organizations is an extreme challenge that must be met. The 2011 Presidential Memorandum on Managing Government Records and subsequent 2012 Directive established values and strategic direction for managing federal electronic records without creating strict standards. The Battelle Record Management Office relies on a Defense Department standard for enterprise content management systems to be secure, searchable and capable of preserving contextual relationships and on the Code of Federal Regulations regarding equivalence of electronic records and signatures to paper. The result demonstrates a record's integrity and authenticity and enables it to be discovered and accessed. Defined access permissions and an audit trail add further assurances. Interoperability through application program interface layers is another requirement, being addressed through advanced platform development, which may provide the solution for authenticity and contextual preservation.
EDITOR'S SUMMARYIn a digital age, it is very difficult to maintain complete privacy when posting on social media or making purchases. Individual activity on the internet is increasingly collected by corporations, even with the user's knowledge, and can be used to predict future behavior, purchasing choices or other sensitive subjects. This data analysis is often done without a user's consent and in many cases presents unethical behavior and breaches of privacy. In the world of libraries, the privacy of patrons has been tantamount for decades, but trying to keep up with privacy codes and still make use of this big data can be challenging for librarians. Big data can be beneficial to libraries in many ways, and if pointed at library systems, rather than the habits of patrons, can also keep privacy intact.
EDITOR'S SUMMARY Bibliometric evaluation for research in the field of sciences can be a good way to assess the quality and factual basis of claims and can lead to more funding for authors and for research work. However, due to the more diverse fields covered, this type of evaluation is less effective in the world of humanities. Many professionals and researchers in humanities fields believe that bibliometric evaluation is meant only for STEM research and can't properly assess any findings made in humanities. Four common claims made about bibliometrics in humanities are that bibliometrics do not adequately cover the non‐uniform nature of humanities; greater bibliometric coverage will not solve all the research problems in humanities subjects; metrics use already has an impact on humanities research practices and finally; other evaluation methods, like altmetrics, are conventional.
EDITOR'S SUMMARYCreating metaphors to explain a data model is vital to explain the model to people without the knowledge or experience to understand it quickly. Much like family trees evoke a sense of relationships between people by using the structure and design of a tree, strong metaphors for information architecture can help anyone understand the relationships in any data model. Good metaphors, such as web “pages,” stick with people, even if they are not completely accurate. New ways of expressing relationships in data demand new metaphors in order to express the necessity of data models to executives deciding whether or not to fund a project or even programmers that need to build around the model. Complex metaphors such as oceans, with ecosystems of fish and other organisms reacting to their environment, are far more accurate and fluid for explaining modern information architecture.
EDITOR'S SUMMARY Zombies have been sweeping across all types of media for many years, and their popularity continues to rise with TV shows like The Walking Dead and movies like Warm Bodies . The popularity of entertainment about the undead presents an interesting opportunity to draw parallels between the fiction of zombies and the reality of human politics, societies and issues. In an effort to connect this discourse with born‐digital publishing, [ZOMBIES REIMAGINED] was created. The effort behind [ZOMBIES REIMAGINED] was undertaken by faculty, students and librarians at Swarthmore College, and it was launched in May 2016 as a public website with individual exhibits in the form of web pages. The web pages were authored by students in the author's seminar and turned into an online experience with the help of Swarthmore librarians. Due to the success of the project, a large update to the site was launched in May 2017 with all new student authors and topics discussed.
EDITOR'S SUMMARYThe United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees reports 65 million refugees around the world, a 50 percent increase over the last five years and a 75 percent increase over the last 20 years. With over 80 percent of refugees living below the poverty line, new ideas and innovations are desperately needed to assist with refugee integration into host countries. This information behavior investigation is an attempt to identify information needs, both individually and publically, in refugee integration. Concepts considered in this investigation include the hierarchy of needs, social capital, accessibility and quality of information and sense‐making. One main goal of the investigation was to determine situations where refugees experienced a lack of information during the integration process. Using the materials for this investigation, Olubukola Oduntan created and submitted the winning video for the first ASIS&T Doctoral Student Research Video competition.
EDITOR'S SUMMARY Large organizations relying heavily on knowledge work require effective capture and reuse of information, enabled through consistent use of standardized enterprise content metadata. The Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) has undertaken a standardization effort, building an internal content schema based on established metadata field standards that are content- and application-agnostic but locally customizable for application to a broad variety of repositories. The JPL adopted the Dublin Core standard, with its Simple and Qualified properties as well as further refined Custom sub-properties. The JPL Resource Schema serves as an enterprise-wide metadata standard, while specific application profiles state the available fields and field labels for each repository or content management system. The schema's terms are drawn from two distinct but semantically related vocabularies and linked by an intermediary registry tying granular listings for specific applications to enterprise-level terms. The registry mappings permit the use of both local metadata and higher level or external systems. The effort has demonstrated the importance of consistent application of both granular and general metadata for information capture and revealed important lessons about adopting the Dublin Core standard in a large enterprise setting.
The Future of Information Environments, Thinking and Building with ASIS&T began with introductions by Marta Aymerich, vice-president of research and strategic planning of the UOC; Jordi Sánchez-Navarro, director of the studies of information and communication sciences of the UOC; Lynn Silipigni Connaway, president of ASIS&T and senior research scientist and director of user research at OCLC Research (Online Computer Library Center, Inc.) and Agustí Canals, director of the UOC's KIMO group. Next, the introduction of Virginia Ortiz-Repiso, professor at the Carlos III University of Madrid and chair of the European chapter of ASIS&T, gave an overview of the trends in innovation in digital information environments, highlighting different facets of the open concept (open data, open learning, open innovation, etc.), in a context that is a challenge for the design of information products and services and for innovation in the training offered to this area of knowledge. A key source for this trend briefing is an extensive study of undergraduate and postgraduate education provided by the International Academic Network Information Schools, which includes the Carlos III University and the UOC. Then, regarding a more specific initiative, Lynn Silipigni Connaway explained her current project – Digital visitors and residents: how people engage with technology. The project aims to identify how people relate to technologies to acquire information and to communicate with others. How do they access information? How do they communicate in the digital environment? Why do they make the decisions they make when using a technology or a social network? The theoretical framework of visitors and digital residents (V&R) postulates that the way a person relates and uses technology does not depend so much on the age or generation of the individual, but more on the individual's current situation and context. Thus, a digital visitor is characterized by making a functional use of technology, usually linked to a formal need and accustomed to having a fairly passive presence in social networks. In contrast, a resident has a fairly significant online presence and a high level of collaborative activity; his contributions in the digital environment usually leave a certain trace (uploading videos, photos, commenting on networks, etc.). The V&R typology is not a dichotomy, but rather has to be seen as the two extremes of a continuum. In addition, each of us can behave in different ways in different digital spaces, whether it is the intranet of our organization or Facebook, Twitter, etc. The project has been conducted in the United States, United Kingdom, Italy and Spain, including UC3M and UOC. The application of the Digital Visitors & Residents project in the UOC is especially relevant in order to compare the forms of interaction with the technology of students and teachers in a fully online learning environment with the forms of interaction in hybrid or face-to-face learning environments. In this sense, the following interventions were carried out by Agustí Canals, Eva Ortoll and Josep Cobarsí, professors of the UOC and researchers of the research group KIMO. Some results are curious and remarkable. On the one hand, it is evident one of the postulates of the theoretical framework is the fact that the age of the users does not mean a more intensive use of the technologies, as the comment of one of the interviewed teachers illustrates: “At home at lunchtime, on the weekend, we are together at the table (my wife and my college kids) and it's the guys who say “Do you want to leave the cellphone, please?” Also during the presentation of the results of the project at the UOC, the importance of different elements became clear. On the one hand, it is clear that there is a need to pay close attention to the human and communication factor in the processes of interaction with the technologies. Interviewees in the project, whether they have a resident profile or have a visitor profile, depending upon the content and situation, consider that the intervention of people in the access and use of digital information is essential to help give context and credibility to the content with which they access and use. On the other hand, users have a need to deepen the personalization of certain services and products. A final aspect on which the presentation focused was related to digital infoxication or infoxication. Applying filters to the overabundance of information and communication or applying strategies of digital disconnection seem to be areas in which we must be very attentive. Also related to the V&R project, some mapping tools were presented by Lynn Silipigni Connaway and Titia van der Werf, senior program officer, OCLC Research, in an interactive session. The last talk was by Lynn Silipigni Connaway to explain the role of ASIS&T as an association that offers its members great potential for professional networking in an international environment, with some 2,000 partners worldwide. Virginia Ortiz-Repiso discussed the activities and opportunities to interact with hundreds of members in the ASIS&T Europe Chapter. All in all, the workshop gave us some clues as to where we should continue to work with researchers and information professionals to offer the best experience of interaction and communication to the users of this so-digital world. In this regard, the potential of the Digital Visitors & Residents conceptual approach to typify user behavior and design (or redesign) services and products was revealed in both the results discussed and in an interactive workshop and subsequent discussion of information.
EDITOR'S SUMMARY A basic requirement for linked data is that records include structured and clear data about topics of interest or searched Things , formatted in ways that allow linking to other data. While linked data presents great potential for the library community, libraries' existing digital knowledge is largely inaccessible, stuck in the increasingly obsolete MARC format, readable only by humans and certain library systems. To maximize the value of linked data using library content, important entities and relationships must be defined and made available, codings that are machine understandable must be adapted for linked data purposes, and persistent identifiers must be substituted for text. The Virtual International Authority File aggregates identifiers published by numerous sources in a variety of domains and languages to help produce a linked data collection of information on given topics, making possible rich linked data that is machine readable and presented in the user's language. Since 1994 the Program for Cooperative Cataloging (PCC) has worked toward cost effective uniformity of library standards. The PCC's ultimate goal is to transition from MARC to linked data through widespread adoption of standards and best practices by the library community.
EDITOR'S SUMMARY The third annual Virtual Symposium on Information & Technology in the Arts & Humanities, held on April 18 and 19, 2017, centered on a theme of open science in the humanities. Presentations at the Symposium have included topics such as data visualization, historical images, interactive exhibits and linked data. The 2017 theme of open humanities was a starting point for the speakers to consider how open science has and can impact the world of humanities in various ways. Speakers at the symposium discussed analyzing writing practices on the internet using web scrapers, data management in the humanities, visual literacy skills of graduate and undergraduate students and the challenge researchers face in trying to keep up with publications in their field.
EDITOR'S SUMMARY Mexico's political history has seen several parties rise and fall in the 21st century, and amidst the many transitions, the Mexican people have seen a divide growing in their society. This divide covers many areas, such as economic standing, access to healthcare and education, and access to digital technology. The digital divide means that access to internet service and smartphones is often limited to the affluent. However, access to technology is just one aspect of the digital divide. Citizens also require training and education in how to use the technology and where to access information. Currently, the vast majority of internet users in Mexico are 24 years of age and younger, meaning that older generations need the access and education in technology use. With more Mexican citizens given access to technology, more can actively participate in government and create a government that they deserve.
We, the European Student Chapter, invited ASIS&T members in Copenhangen for the 2016 Annual Meeting and people from Copenhagen to join us for an informal get-together in Copenhagen on October 15, one evening before the meeting began. We sent invitation letters to professors, students and practitioners from the information science field in Copenhagen and to all colleagues from ASIS&T. Our intention was to encourage people to get in touch with others interested in the same topics – members and non-members of the ASIS&T community. Thus, everybody who participated was invited to bring ideas and for discussion. First up for discussion was Tjaša Jug with her award-winning Movie Meets Science video about book metadata and readers. The audience started to discuss with Tjaša her video presentation, creating our first topic table. Next we invited the audience to suggest further topics. Finally, five topic tables were generated at which the miniBARcamp guests met and talked about their backgrounds, their research and their ideas. As an unexpected special treat, Greg Welch, scheduled as the first keynote speaker for ASIS&T AM on the following afternoon, joined us with the topic virtual reality. The miniBARcamp was a big success. We thank Tjaša and all other guests of this introductory effort for the nice evening. We particularly thank ASIS&T president Nadia Caidi and president-elect Lynn Connaway for taking the time to join us. The miniBARcamp was an attempt to represent the ASIS&T community in Copenhagen and to invite people who are not yet in our community. The European Chapter providing initial funding with additional support from the chapter development fund of ASIS&T. We would love to see continuing the miniBARcamp in the following years to promote the community of ASIS&T at the city where the Annual Meeting is held. Thus, we are looking forward to meet next year with professors, students and practitioners in Washington, DC, for a joyful miniBARcamp one evening before the 80th Annual Meeting of ASIS&T.
EDITOR'S SUMMARY Greg Welch, chair of healthcare simulation at University of Central Florida, spoke at the 2016 ASIS&T Annual Meeting as the first plenary speaker. He discussed the meaning of a telepresence valley , which is the gap between people in a situation where telepresence is involved. Welch noted that telepresence is markedly different from telecollaboration and, in an ideal telepresence situation, people from different remote locations can feel they are together in one common location. One telepresence application, TLE TeachLivE, is a simulated classroom that allows teachers to improve their skills in interacting with students. TLE simulates avatar students that react to the teacher, thus giving realistic feedback in real time. Welch also discussed applications in the healthcare industry, such as a touch‐sensitive mannequin head that Welch and his team are developing to react to the actions of a provider.
EDITOR'S SUMMARYASIS&T SIG/MET held the METRICS 2016 workshop on October 14, 2016, in Copenhagen, Denmark. Topics covered during the workshop include informetrics, information retrieval, bibliometrics and scientometrics, especially as they apply to evaluation of individuals and scholarly work. Nine presentations were given at the full‐day workshop, as well as seven posters, three of which were open posters. The end of the event included presentation of the Best Student Paper award, a staple in the METRICS workshop, and the prize winners were invited to discuss their papers at the event. The SIG/MET Best Paper Award sponsored by Altmetric.com and Digital Science was awarded to Dangzhi Zhao and Lucinda Johnson for their case study To What Degree Are Uni‐citations Perfunctory? A Case Study.
EDITOR'S SUMMARY At the ASIS&T Annual Meeting in Copenhagen, Peter Ingwersen expressed surprise and gratitude for being honored with the Association's 2016 Award of Merit. The professor emeritus from Denmark's Royal School of Library and Information Science thanked peers for recognizing him as a mentor and research originator. Ingwersen observed that his own areas of research in interactive information retrieval (IR) and scientometrics/webometrics have come together as converging lines of interest, though research and analysis are often restricted by system and feature limitations. Experimentation, Ingwersen stated, is too little focused on the effective workings of IR models and contexts, repeatability and negative research results, and is instead constrained by practicalities and pragmatics. Ingwersen expressed pleasure at the acceptance of web redundancy, citing his theory of polyrepresentation and noting the value of weighting term and search results underlying ranking of web search results. He credited the ASIS&T meetings and publications for developments stemming from original IR experimental studies.
EDITOR'S SUMMARY The voice of the performing arts is an important – though seldom heard – disciplinary component of information science research. The Open Symphony, a collaboration between a performing musician and computer science students, allowed for creative audience interaction with live music performances. But such interdisciplinary collaboration is difficult and needs to be put within the larger context of questions surrounding value, individual contribution in artistic expression and ownership in the performing arts. Indeed, tensions around the economics of art and commercial versus academic value may hinder collaborations between artists and academia, but with the right framework and definitions of value these efforts could lead to additional forms of cross‐disciplinary exploration.
EDITOR'S SUMMARYASIS&T has continuously worked to enhance diversity and inclusion over its long history, including the formation of the Special Interest Group/International Information Issues and the name change from the American Society for Information Science and Technology to the Association for Information Science and Technology. During the 2016 ASIS&T Annual Meeting (AM), a Diversity and Inclusion Luncheon was held to promote discussion and ideas of new ways for ASIS&T to promote diversity. Attendees of the luncheon were asked to share positive personal experiences with diversity, as well as share ideas for how to bolster diversity and inclusion in future AMs and for ASIS&T as an organization. Suggestions include the meeting being held outside of North America more frequently, inclusion of mentor programs for papers and new attendees of AMs, removing North American‐centric language from communications and more ASIS&T board members from other continents. The suggestions were recommended to the ASIS&T Board for further discussion.
EDITOR'S SUMMARY Open access (OA) has been shaping and benefitting the scientific community for years now, but this new wave of disseminating research freely has not quite taken hold in the field of humanities. Though humanities publishers could also benefit from an OA model, many have been resistant, citing possible issues with plagiarism or appropriation of an author's work for less than ideal uses. There are also challenges with the cost of publishing OA content, which for humanities could be much higher than in the scientific community due to the length of works produced. Some institutions have taken to charging authors to publish their content in an OA model, while others have opted for a membership structure or joining a consortium of other institutions, such as Knowledge Unlatched or the Open Library of Humanities. While many great strides have been taken to bring OA to humanities, there is still work to do to make the study of humanity accessible to all.
EDITOR'S SUMMARY Scholarly research is at the forefront of innovation, especially with a breadth of new technologies that can enhance the research process. However, in a race for scholars to produce more and more new findings, documentation practices and reproduction of results may be neglected. Lack of validation through reproduction can lead to a general distrust of scholarly research and experiments, but a more generous approach to information sharing could be the answer to this issue. Scholars have connected socially for centuries to share their ideas, and this practice has led to some truly innovative ideas that have shaped our world today. With willing participants sharing their ideas and their research methods, new findings can be reproduced and validated, creating a stronger and more trustworthy community of scholars.
