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 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.
information retrieval and bibliometrics, especially webometrics.Additionally, he has been and continues to be active in organizing
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 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.
'And oh, if we ever part, then that might break my heart' (Gershwin and Gershwin, 1937). In the lyric, 'tomato tomahto', the marked, or explicitly differentiated term, is tomahto, corresponding more to the English rather than the United States pronunciation. The marked term of a contrast characteristically designates the exception or minor term and the distinctions contained in the unmarked term may be implicitly, and incompletely, understood. Analogously, information science has often been implicitly based in the United States and influenced by American modes of thought, while European, including English, developments have been the occasionally marked and often minor term. This panel explores European perspectives on information science, explicitly and implicitly contrasting them with United States perspectives, from a base in a number of languages and in Europe and beyond. The panel employs diverse and complementary viewpoints and should make for a lively discussion. It concludes, in sympathy with Gershwin, that cooperation and integration, corresponding to increasing globalization, is the way forward. The combination of European and beyond and United States perspectives on information science is especially appropriate for the first ASIS&T Annual Meeting outside North America.
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.
EDITOR'S SUMMARYIn the modern age of the internet, computers and smartphones, we have access to incredible amounts of information. However, often what we seek from this information is knowledge, which can be expressed as raw information that has been reproduced and curated. Professor Steve Fuller discussed this divide at the 2016 ASIS&T Annual Lecture at Napier University on November 30. Fuller discusses the idea that raw information must be curated and edited in order to express actual knowledge, but in the act of reproducing the information for this purpose, data can become distorted and omitted. Fuller cites Wikileaks as a source of raw information that was handed to media outlets to edit and present as knowledge. Wikipedia is another domain that has become one of the most cited centers of knowledge, but allows anyone to curate information and remains unstudied as a whole.
EDITOR'S SUMMARYMetadata, taxonomies and other similar structures are essential in information architecture today, but often take a long time to fully understand. Metadata is especially misunderstood by many, considering its beginnings as a very technical discipline. For those looking to broaden their knowledge on metadata, Michael C. Andrews' book, Metadata Basics for Web Content: The Unification of Structured Data and Content, is an excellent resource. Despite the title, the book covers the basics of metadata and then goes a step further to explain relationships and present actual use cases. Andrews also defines the terms he is using early on in the book, so that professionals from all areas of information architecture can understand his meaning, even with terms that take on many meanings in the industry.
EDITOR'S SUMMARY Controlled vocabularies or languages are widely used in the field of information retrieval, but questions of whether they are necessary or more effective than free text searching have been unanswered. With the widespread use of free text searching in popular search engines, many in the information retrieval field have wondered how to make controlled vocabularies more useful or effective. Recent studies on this subject have revealed that while controlled vocabularies can produce more precise search results, user characteristics can potentially match those results in the right environment. These studies included a multitude of users from different backgrounds with different search environments. Some of the most important findings of these studies demonstrate that the skill of users and indexers can affect search outcomes just as much as controlled vocabularies.
