Editor's desktop

Abstract

Last year ASIS&T changed its name from the American Society for Information Science and Technology to the Association for Information Science and Technology and established an Asia Pacific chapter. Moreover, the European Chapter was Chapter-of-the-Year, and the Association recently voted to have the 2016 Annual Meeting in Europe. With these and other actions reflect our expanding international interests, this issue is largely dedicated to ASIS&T's present and past global activities and their frequent sponsor: SIG/III (Special Interest Group/International Information Issues). Guest editors Daniel Alemneh and Abebe Rorissa from SIG/III have assembled articles that discuss the founding of SIG/III (Alemneh), ASIS&T's potential role in international information policy (Unsworth) and the Association's current international activities, which are reviewed by past president Diane Sonnenwald and by Diane Pennington and June Abbas, who have been deeply involved with its online education and outreach. Wilson and Gruzd also discuss international education in information science for the underserved, in this case the potential for using massive open online courses (MOOC), while Ghaddar and Caidi discuss improving library services, especially knowledge organization, for indigenous peoples. Two other articles in the section by Agarwal and by Dumas and Rorissa target ASIS&T's internal structure, focusing respectively on the function of regional chapters and SIGS and of student chapters. On the President's Page Harry Bruce, recently returned from the Council of Scientific Society Presidents (CSSP), discusses the common problems of scientific societies and the solutions that ASIS&T is pursuing. In our RDAP Review, Jared Lyle, director of curation services at University of Michigan's Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research (ICPSR), discusses their openICPSR program for data self-publishing, now in beta. Finally, in our feature article, Charles Cole calls upon Google leaders to add features to their system that will support exploratory search, a process that he describes in detail, drawing on his recent book, Information Need: A Theory Connecting Information Search to Knowledge Formation.