ASIS&T Hires New Executive Director

The ASIS&T Board of Directors announces the hiring of Lydia Middleton, MBA, CAE, as its new executive director. Middleton, who began work in May, was hired after an extensive search from a pool of 200 applicants.

“On behalf of the ASIS&T Board, I am thrilled to welcome Lydia Middleton as our new executive director,” Lynn Silipigni Connaway, ASIS&T president says. “Lydia brings a wealth of experience leading non-profit scholarly and professional associations. She has increased revenue and expanded membership by introducing new opportunities for sponsorships, collaboration and engagement. As ASIS&T celebrates its 80th anniversary, the Board believes Lydia is the best person to lead us into a new period of growth and increased offerings for our members.”

Lydia has served as executive director with the American Academy of Orthotists and Prosthetists, the Association for University Programs in Health Administration and the David A. Winston Health Policy Fellowship. She also serves as an adjunct faculty member at George Washington University.

“I am tremendously excited to be joining the team at ASIS&T,” remarked Middleton. “ASIS&T is an organization which has had a long and successful tradition of service to the information science community. I look forward to continuing that tradition while seeking new opportunities for member engagement, strategic growth and enhanced impact for the organization.”

Lydia succeeds Dick Hill who retired this year after nearly 27 years as ASIS&T executive director.

Some 80 years ago, a group of individuals nominated by and representing major scientific and professional societies, foundations and government agencies got together to form the American Documentation Institute (ADI) with the expressed purpose of using microfilm as an information storage medium and reproduction tool. Could Watson Davis and his contemporaries have known where their efforts to find ways to conserve publication space in technical journals would take the soon-to-be-named field of information science?

Now, in 2017, ADI is the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T), and ASIS&T is celebrating its 80 years of service to the field of information science and the technologies it has both helped spawn and incorporate into the vast information age in which we now live and work. This fall in the suburbs of Washington, DC, where it all began, ASIS&T and its members will raise their glasses in honor of all they have done in support of the profession.

Diversity of Engagement: Connecting People and Information in the Physical and Virtual Worlds is the theme of the 80^th anniversary meeting, focusing on the diverse ways in which people from different backgrounds, cultures and disciplines forge connections with each other, discover and use information, and engage with technology. The meeting is October 27-November 1, 2017, headquartered at the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Arlington, Virginia.

Two incredible keynote speakers have been identified for the plenary sessions at this year's event. Richard Marks, senior research engineer and head of the PlayStation Magic Lab at Sony Interactive Entertainment, and William Powers, best-selling author of Hamlet's Blackberry: A Practical Philosophy for Building a Good Life in the Digital Age, will set the tone each day for what promises to be an exciting look at where the field is headed.

Marks, who has worked at Sony's game division for 17 years, is widely acknowledged as one of the pioneers of virtual reality. He was an avionics major at MIT before getting his Ph.D. in aeronautics and astronautics from Stanford University. His thesis, done in conjunction with the Monterey Bay Aquarium Research Institute, was in the area of visual sensing for automatic control of an underwater robot. He then joined Teleos Research, a computer vision start-up that was later acquired by Autodesk. Inspired in 1999 by the unveiling of PlayStation 2, he joined PlayStation R&D to investigate the use of live video input for gaming and develop new interactive experiences.

Powers graduated from Harvard University with a degree in U.S. history and literature, and he did graduate student in Spain as a Rotary International Scholar. He began his career as a U.S. Senate staffer working on foreign relations, intelligence and military affairs. He then transitioned into journalism and writing, holding a staff position at The Washington Post, and writing for The Atlantic, The New York Times and many other publications. Hamlet's Blackberry grew out of research he did as a fellow at Harvard's Shorenstein Center. The book has been widely praised for its insights on the digital future. Since 2014, Powers has been with the MIT Media Lab as a research scientist developing new technologies for journalism, governance and the public sphere.

Though the deadlines for most submissions for presentations at the Annual Meeting have passed, proposals for visual presentation and for the doctoral colloquium are still being accepted. For full information about submissions, please check in at www.asist.org/events/annual-meeting/annual-meeting-2017/asist-2017-call-for-papers/.

The prestigious ASIS&T Annual Awards are presented each year at the Annual Meeting after a nomination and jury process for each one. Though the deadlines to nominate individuals for some of those awards have already passed, many others are still open. These are among them:

Get award descriptions and deadlines for all awards at www.asist.org/about/awards.

Doctoral students in the latter stages of their dissertation research are invited to participate in the 2017 ASIS&T Doctoral Colloquium to be held in conjunction with the ASIS&T Annual Meeting. The half-day event will be held on Tuesday, October 31, 8:30 a.m.-12:30 p.m., at the headquarters hotel for the Annual Meeting. Students accepted for the doctoral colloquium will receive full conference registration without fee. The deadline for submissions is July 14, 2017.

The 2017 ASIS&T Doctoral Colloquium provides a supportive and critical learning opportunity to discuss works in progress (or completed works for students who have defended their dissertations before the conference) and to highlight theoretical and methodological problems/issues for further discussion and inquiry with senior mentors and colloquium participants. In one-on-one sessions with senior mentors, participants will have the opportunity to receive feedback and comments about their work. The colloquium organizers will invite a group of prominent professors and experts to serve as mentors during the Doctoral Colloquium.

Submissions to the Doctoral Colloquium are invited from PhD students in the post-proposal stage of dissertation research or who have a completed research design or have begun data collection. All proposals will undergo a thorough review process. The program committee will select the best submissions.

For full information about submissions, please visit www.asist.org/news/doctoral-colloquium-call-for-participation/.