The Last Night in UAE
Dean Michele Cloonan and GSLIS Adjuncts Sig Berger and Harvey Varnet gather
with friends on the last night in the UAE (July 2006).
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November 14, 2006
November 08, 2006
Libraries for Austin
Billboard on South Congress Street
New Member Brunch
A newly formed SIG at the New Member ASIS&T Brunch.
Fun with Tagging
From a Let's Talk about Tagging Poster
Fun with Tagging
From a Let's Talk about Tagging Poster
Fun with Tagging
From a Let's Talk about Tagging Poster
November 07, 2006
ASIST (Sheila) - Monday, Nov. 6
The first session of the day is a session on visualization. The first presenter, Brad Eden, showed a rather dizzying array of different sorts of visualizations -- up to and including "virtual Vaudeville" (http://www.virtualvaudeville.com/), which simulates an actual Vaudeville show from the early 20th century. The stuff Brad showed was interesting in a "gee whiz' sort of way, but didn't really touch on the sorts of thing that interest me about visualization -- viewing complex information in ways that make the detection of patterns, outliers, etc., easier.
Linn Marks Collins from Los Alamos National Lab spoke about some projects at LANL that are trying to reduce the amount of time scientists spend searching for information. One of the projects is called ScienceSifter, and is designed to use RSS to create customized feeds for different lab groups at LANL based on the reading habits in the lab. In addition to a conventional title-abstract interface for the results, they have also developed a hyperbolic tree interface. Collins urged librarians to get involved in the cyberinfrastructure movement (spearheaded by NSF) -- because at this point it is scientists and not digital libraries people who are setting the agenda.
Chaomei Chen from Drexel spoke on collective intelligence and holistic sense-making. Chen defines collective intelligence as an emergent property of a society, community, etc. The idea in collective intelligence is to identify the hot topics in a subject area, how they are related, how they evolve, and (most interesting) how to identify emergent insights within the subject area.
The second session of the day was on the leisure perspective. One of the ideas of the session was to establish a "serious leisure perspective' in information-seeking and use. Includes ELIS (Everyday Life Information-seeking), conferences (such as Information-Seeking in Context (ISIC). There are a number of findings within leisure domains that contradict widely held propositions about information-seeking behavior, such as anomalous states of knolwedge, information anxiety, or the principle of least effort.
Robert Stebbins, a sociologist from the University of Calgary, spoke about the serious leisure perspective. Part of this perspective is a typology of leisure. At the top level, leisure breaks down into casual leisure ("an immediately, intrinsically rewarding, relatively short-lived pleasurable core activity, requiring little or no special training to enjoy it"), serious leisure ("systematic pursuit of an amateur, hobbyist, or volunteer core activity that people find so substantial, interesting, and fulfilling" that they pursue it as an avocation), and projects ("a short-term, moderately complicated, either one-shot or occasional, though infrequent, creative undertaking carried out in free time"). Some characteristics of serious leisure include perseverance, career, significant effort in acquiring knowledge, training, and skill, durable benefits, ethos/social world, and identity. There has been very little work done to look at amateurs in either science (astronomers?) or arts/entertainment, although there has been some work done on amateur sports participants.
I attended my first Student Chapter Advisor meeting as the new faculty advisor for the Simmons chapter, and it was interesting to hear what other student groups around the country are up to. The only bad thing about this meeting was that I wasn't able to make it to the SIG KNIT dinner!
The Alumni Reception was great for me -- a good opportunity to catch up with all my colleagues at UNC-Chapel Hill. The International Reception was kinda crazed, what with the raffle and all the silent auctions going on. I forgot to pack any of my knitted stuff to put into the auction -- but I did get a book for cheap!
Impressions from ASIS&T (Ellen)
Greetings from Austin! I'm having a good time at my first LIS conference. It's been a lot of fun to meet students from so many other schools, and I'm amazed at how international the conference is. I have seen people from Japan, Finland, Australia, Ireland, India...
I've created a page on our wiki for the notes I've taken during sessions. So far I have only the plenary session up but more will be coming when I get the chance to type them up.
One of the sessions I attended was Search Result Visualization. The first speaker, Brad Eden from UCSB, gave us a quick tour of some of the places on the web you can play around with 3d information visualization. Linn Marks Collins from Los Alamos National Laboratory spoke about two tools they've developed, Active Graph and Science Sifter. Active Graph is an interactive scatter plot and Science Sifter uses RSS technologies to create new feeds which can be viewed as lists, lists with descriptions, or as a hyperbolic tree. Chaomei Chen from Drexel showed several cool ways of visualizing information in his talk, Collective Intelligence and Holistic Sense Making, including using one of my favorite toys, Google Earth, to show locations of citations.
Another session I went to yesterday was entitled Taking Leisure Seriously. Robert A. Stebbins gave a talk entitled Leisure and Information Science: Bridging the Gap. He has written extensively about the serious leisure perspective. He divides leisure into three categories: casual leisure, serious leisure, and projects. Serious leisure is divided into amateurism, volunteerism, and hobbies. (More info about the serious leisure perpsective)
To end on a related note, last night some members of the special interest group on knitting (SIG/KNIT) went out to dinner. Keep your eyes open for upcoming research into the yarn-seeking behavior of knitters, pattern designing for uncertainty, and 3-d visualization of yarn stashes.
ASIST (Candy) - Day Four - Later
I am on the Annual Meeting Committee for AM07 in Milwaukee, so we had a business lunch in one of the hotel restaurants and planned strategy (keynote speakers, session types, sponsorship, and so on). It's a great bunch, and I am looking forward to next year already.
In the afternoon, I spent much of the time in the hotel room working on my SIG/CON presentation and loading some pictures into flickr.
The evening was filled with receptions. The alumni reception was well attended, and featured carved roasts (turkey and beef). I have developed a taste for a local beer called Shiner Bock, as you will see in this photo. From there I went to a reception hosted by Syracuse (where I got my PhD), and then on to the SIG III International Reception, where they hold an auction to raise money to bring ASIST memebers from developing countries to the conference. Finally I was in the Presidential Suite for a tradition where past presidents welcome the new president. By that time my camera memory was overloaded, or I would have taken some pictures - some pretty important scholars and movers and shakers have been presidents of ASIST.
November 06, 2006
Mingling at the conference
Impressions of ASIS&T
This is my first time at an ASIS&T conference, and so far it's been an interesting experience. I don't have a lot of time right now (wireless access at the hotel costs $10/day, and we've opted not to pay the fee, so myself, Ellen, Brittany and Jen have only the time we're at the apartment we're staying in to be online), so this will be very brief and impressionistic.
Between my own exhaustion and the lack of easy access to internet connections earlier in the day (it's 11:15 pm Boston time right now), I'm afraid I won't do much justice to any of the sessions I've been to thus far. I have taken some notes, which I'll get up on the ASIS&T wiki once we return. (In the meantime, Ellen has put up her notes on the plenary session from Sunday afternoon.)
The best session that I went to today was titled "Toward a General Approach to Information Organization." Four different speakers talked for about 15 minutes each about their research on information organization, but in a very general sense. One spoke about his research on how information organization is taught in library schools; another talked about five axioms he's developed for how to think about the records we create. (The program synopsis does a better job than I can right now of explaining what the presenters talked about.)
In general though, as with everything I've experienced within the field of LIS, everyone is very friendly and approachable. ASIS&T as a society is very welcoming to new members (all of the committee meetings are open to anyone and everyone, and new members are especially encouraged to attend).
ASIST (Candy) - Day Four - iSchools
I organized a session called "The iSchools Movement", a panel chaired by Andy Dillon and featuring a bunch of deans and our own Michele - the sole representative of a non-ischool. There was some disagreement about when ischools started, ranging from the mid-1960s to the 70s to a couple of years ago. There was a lot of talk about what makes them different, and the answers tended to focus on interdisciplinarity and broad definitions of information and social change. The ischools aren't a professional organization, nor an accrediting body. They're more like a group of like-minded people from programs that meet certain criteria - must have a doctoral program, must report directly to a chancellor or equivalent, and must pony up $10K. In fact, Simmons is eligible to join, under those criteria. So the question is, what do you get for your money. That question wasn't asked.
The I-School Movement (SIG/ED)
The I-School Movement was discussed by a panel of five this morning, which included our very own Dean Michele Cloonan. They discussed various topics across the I-School movement, including whether or not it was a good idea, the benefits of the movement, and what it should be called or encompass. The moderator, Andrew Dillon, did a fantastic job of summarizing the various ideas behind the program and being sarcastic about the questions he was supplementing. The panelists, some of which seemed to feel more comfortable sitting in front of a group of peers than others, all had something to say, although they seemed to take different views on the answers to the various questions presented. Cloonan presented some of the historical information behind the movement and discussed it from a non I-School view.
Curiously enough, all of the panelists were relatively positive about the movement and seemed to think it was a great way to go, despite a few questions and set backs here and there. The audience seemed less inclined to agree, especially in regards to the idea of inter-departmental work and research groups. Overall everyone seemed to agree that I-Schools and LIS programs need to avoid being swallow and taken down by a perhaps dying, or at the least changing, university system. There also seems to be a need to state outright what it is that I-Schools want to do and to try and advertise this movement to people other than 17 year olds.
Volunteer services
Yesterday was my first day as a volunteer and I found the experience somewhat exhausting. I was positioned in the Placement Center directly under an air conditioning vent for four hours and was, at the end of the day convinced of two things: My eyes were dry and they did not advertise the Center in an efficient manner. Not many people seem to realize that it was there and several prospective employers were simply leaving their advertisements in the foyer instead of putting them in the binders where candidates could find them.
In the evening, after the placement center closed for the day and when I was at liberty to try and see what was going on in the public There are several incredible people here, all willing to talk as long as they are not involved in a deep discussion with a friend that they only see once a year. The experience so far has been fantastic, and although I had to take out a loan just to come, it has been worth the added interest so far.
ASIST (Candy) - Day Three
It was a very busy day. New England was well represented at the Chapter Assembly, run by Harvard's Beata Panagopoulos, Chapter Asssembly Director. Caryn Anderson was the voting NEASIST chapter member, and accepted the annual Chapter Event of the Year award on behalf of the chapter. Caryn also helped to run the New Member brunch later that morning. The brunch is always a great deal of fun, and this year was no exception. Again, New England members were prominent, no more so than when outgoing NEASIST chair Beatrice Pulliam drew a raffle number for a book, and it turned out to be our own Alison Cody, vice-chair of the Student Chapter. Not to mention Michael Leach, current ASIST president, being a Simmons adjunct faculty and one of our doctoral students.
I have to admit that I played hookey for most of the afternoon, and went to the annual Austin Celtic festival, and so I missed the plenary, and will have to leave that reporting to others. I got back in time for SIG Rush, where all the special interest groups send representatives to recruit new members (and there's a cash bar and snacks). I ran into a bunch of students, and found that the Dean and most of the rest of the faculty have arrived by now.
For the last event of the day, I hosted the annual students-only party in the presidential suite (thanks Michael). We had cheap wine and chips and a great time. Thanks to Alison, Jennifer, Ellen, Brittany, Sheila, and Rong for helping me set up (we had an especially tough time with very poor corkscrews).
It's 1:15 am, and that's it for the day. flick updates will have to wait until tomorrow.
November 05, 2006
ASIST (Candy) - Day Two
Today was Saturday - a day for workshops and committee stuff. I had a workshop at 8:30, so I headed out for a Starbuck's at 7. There is a coffee place in the hotel, and it does serve Starbuck's, but I figured I would have a bigger healthier choice of breakfast breads at a real one. Silly me. Austin's hopping 6th Street is abandoned and a bit seedy in the glare of a sunny early morning. Nonetheless, I did find the Starbuck's.
My workshop was called "Thesaurus to Ontology", and was about extending thesaural and other relationships into two XML schema - OWL and SKOS - both of which lend themselves to Semantic Web activity. If you take Subject Analysis (or maybe Information Organization) with me you may hear more about this.
After the workshop I took a free (!) city bus to the corporate headquarters and largest US store of Whole Foods. It is incredible - the best WF food court I have seen, a huge grocery store, and a kitchen store associated with the WF culinary institute. I stocked up on healthy breakfast and room snack stuff, and also purchased some "beverages" for the student party on Sunday night. I ran into Linnea on the way back, and saw Sheila Denn coming out of her workshop when I got back to the hotel.
The local LIS school, at University of Texas, threw a reception at a tavern called The Cedar Door, so a bunch of us headed down there. I saw a couple of Simmons students, had a beer, chatted with some friends (including former Simmons faculty member Gary Geisler, who says hi), and walked back with Edie Rasmussen (U British Columbia), next ASIST President.
Pictures from today can be found on the SIMMONS ASIST flickr site, in the ASIST 2006 set.
ASIST (Candy) - Day One
My friend Beata Panagopoulos (Harvard librarian) and I flew together from Boston to Dallas/Fort Worth to Austin on Friday. As an indication of the Texan friendliness to come, when Beata told the man sitting next to her that she was vegetarian, he proceeded to write down the names AND addresses of ten suitable restaurants in Austin. Several other passengers chimed in with recommendations for activities.
There wasn't much ASIST activity on Friday night, though there were a lot of people wearing Texas Longhorn t-shirts (big game on Saturday). I did establish my Hilton Internet account ($10/day - outrageous) so I can do this and send photos to flickr. I spent the rest of Friday doing some schoolwork (yeah, yeah, I know - you have no sympathy.