Ringing in the New
by Donald T. Hawkins
By the time you read this, we will be getting ready to turn to the next page of the calendar and start the new year. Like many industries, the information industry takes a holiday from conferences from mid-December through the new year. But the following three are a noteworthy way to end 2005:
- Most of the speakers at the seventh International Conference on Grey Literature (GL7), which will be held Dec. 5–6 in Nancy, France (http://www.textrelease.com/pages/2/index.htm), represent European organizations. Many of the presentations will focus on institutional repositories. For the third consecutive year, the conference is organized and hosted by INIST-CNRS. Timed for the week after the Online Information 2005 meeting in London, this conference follows up on open access issues (which are timely for just about everyone in the academic library world).
- For military librarians, the 49th annual Military Librarians Workshop, sponsored by SLA’s Military Librarians Division, is a significant venue. This workshop will be held Dec. 5–9 in Las Vegas (http://www.dtic.mil/mlw/2005/index.html). Major topics on the conference agenda include organizational innovation strategies, disruptive technologies, information literacy, information warfare, and storytelling as a way to communicate in an organization.
- The eighth International Conference on Asian Digital Libraries (ICADL2005) will be held Dec. 12–15 in Bangkok, Thailand (http://www.icadl2005.ait.ac.th/index.htm).
A Roaring Start to the New Year
The new year starts off with the 39th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-39), which will be held Jan. 4–7 in Kauai, Hawaii (http://www.hicss.hawaii.edu/home.htm). Although the conference focuses on business information systems, the Digital Media: Content and Communication track includes genres of digital documents, information retrieval and digital library applications, persistent conversation (searching, structuring, and annotating instant messages, chat, e-mail, blogs, bulletin boards, text messages, etc.), and semantic Web or software agent technologies. Since HICSS is a major conference, it typically attracts more than 600 attendees.
Four societies have scheduled meetings for the second half of January (see Table 1). Since three of the meetings are held during the same 10-day period in January and in the same state, it would be convenient to attend two or more.
The theme of the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE) conference is From Research to Practice: The Scholarship of Teaching and Learning in LIS Education.
Randy Bass, assistant provost for teaching and learning initiatives at Georgetown University, will keynote the event and present The Difference that Inquiry Makes: Fostering a Scholarship of Teaching and a Culture of Learning.
SLA’s Winter Meeting (now called the Leadership Summit) will be keynoted by Doug Lipp, an expert on customer service, leadership, and diversity and a former head of training at Disney Studio’s Walt Disney University. He was on the start-up team for Tokyo Disneyland, Disney’s first international theme park. According to the SLA Web site, Lipp’s keynote address, titled Even Monkeys Fall From Trees: Strategies For Effective Leadership, “take[s] attendees on an insightful journey behind the scenes to discover both the secret of Disney’s success and how it has overcome spectacular challenges.” Disney’s appeal to a large market of all age groups is legendary, so Lipp’s address can be billed as not only a success story but as a relevant discussion on leadership as well.
The Software and Information Industry Association (SIIA) Information Industry Summit features a headlining list of speakers. Harold McGraw III, chairman, president, and CEO of The McGraw-Hill Companies, will give the opening keynote, and the luncheon keynote and interview will be by Richard Harrington, president and CEO of Thomson Corp.
Other industry leaders scheduled to appear include Joe Mansueto, founder, chairman, CEO, and director of Morningstar, Inc. (investment advisors and producer of the well-known mutual funds directory); Donald Katz, chairman and CEO of Audible, Inc. (the Internet’s premier audio information and entertainment service); James Kollegger, CEO of Genesys Partners (a venture capital, investment banking, and development firm specializing in early stage information technology ventures); and Paul Sagan, president and CEO of Akamai (a leading business and content applications delivery company).
Panel discussions, including Buyers, Buyers Everywhere and Not a Site License in Sight!, Deals Gone Wild!, and My Media: the explosion of User Generated Journalism, will tackle relevant topics.
Looking Ahead—Mark Your Calendar
A little later in the calendar year, two other organizations—NFAIS and ASIDIC—are scheduled to hold their meetings. (More information will appear in one of my future columns.)
The 48th NFAIS Annual Conference, which will take place Feb. 26–28 in Philadelphia (http://www.nfais.org), will focus on the theme Content Unleashed: Delivering the New Information Experience. The keynote speaker, R. J. Pittman, CEO and co-founder of Groxis, will provide an overview of the factors driving the new information experience in his talk titled New Trends in Communication and Information-Seeking Behavior. The Miles Conrad Lecturer (the highest award NFAIS bestows) will be Carol Tenopir, a professor at the University of Tennessee who is well-known to information professionals. Tenopir has been instrumental in studies about online user behavior during the search process.
Finally, the ASIDIC Spring Meeting will be held March 12–14 in Fort Myers, Fla. Its theme is Digitization: From Inception to Income. The meeting will be keynoted by Stephen Abram, vice president of innovation at SirsiDynix. The endnote will be given by Redalen Group president Robert Asleson, whose career in the information industry has spanned 40 years and who was a pioneer in the early years for many of today’s leading companies.
Enjoy your holiday break, and come back ready to soak up 2006’s new trends.
Donald T. Hawkins is information technology and database consultant at Information Today, Inc. His e-mail address is dthawkins@verizon.net. Send your comments about this column to itletters@infotoday.com.
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