Editor's desktop

Abstract

This issue is largely devoted to coverage of the 2008 ASIS&T Annual Meeting, which was held in Columbus, Ohio, in late October. The coverage takes various forms from photographs and news about our award winners to reports on the plenary speeches, contributions from award recipients and coverage of pre-conference events. The conference was well attended, particularly considering the current economic environment. Its theme, “People Transforming Information-Information Transforming People,” encouraged an emphasis on the human factors in our profession, an emphasis that is reflected in many of our articles. In addition to an expanded version of Inside ASIS&T, Steve Hardin has been kind enough to cover both plenary sessions for us. In the first address, Genevieve Bell discussed the Internet as a cultural institution, while in the second Connie Yowell gave the audience a preview of the findings of a MacArthur Foundation-funded three-year ethnographic study on youth and digital media that focused on high and middle school students. The study is now available on the Foundation's website at http://www.macfound.org. Observing the pre-conference action, Kalpana Shankar and Howard Rosenbaum report on the 4th Social Informatics SIG Research Symposium: People, Information and Technology: The Social Analysis of Computing. They relate the papers presented to three main areas of content: the workplace, the interaction between information and government, and new analytical frameworks, methodologies and theories in the field. As part of its annual activities ASIS&T presents many awards. We often carry acceptance speeches or other pieces from the recipients. As the first of such contributions over the coming issues we have a reflection about her ASIS&T experience from Elise Lewis, co-winner of the James M. Cretsos Leadership Award, which honors relatively new members (less than seven years) who have demonstrated outstanding leadership within the Society. Finally, our regular columns are concerned with the relationship between academic journals and the fields they serve. On the one hand we have an exceptionally extensive information architecture (IA) column in which Andres Resmini, Kakriina Byström and Dorte Madsen, who have been involved in the development of the Journal of Information Architecture, discuss their approach to the problem of defining IA. On the other Don Case, in his President's Page, discusses the desirability of increasing the overlap between the ASIS&T membership that publishes academic research and the body of authors publishing in our journal.