ASIST 2011

The ASIST Annual Meeting is the main venue for disseminating research centered on advances in the information sciences and related applications of information technology. 

ASIST 2011 builds on the success of the 2010 conference structure and will have the integrated program that is an ASIST strength. This will be achieved using the six reviewing tracks pioneered in 2010, each with its own committee of respected reviewers to ensure that the conference meets your high expectations for standards and quality. These reviewers, experts in their fields, will assist with a rigorous peer-review process.

Track 1 – Information Behaviour
Chair:  Sanda Erdelez, University of Missouri
Co-Chair:  Dania Bilal, University of Tennessee
Information needs, information seeking, information gaps and sense-making.

Track 2 – Knowledge Organization
Chair:  Diane R. Neal, University of Western Ontario
Co-Chair:  Margaret Kipp, University of Milwaukee
Indexing, index construction, indexing languages, thesaurus construction, terminology, classification of information in any form, tagging (expert, user-based, automatic), filtering, metadata, standards for metadata, information architecture.

Track 3 – Interactive Information & Design
Chair:  Jim Jansen, Pennsylvania State University
Co-Chair:  Soo Young Rieh, University of Michigan
How human beings use and communicate with information or computers, design of interactive technologies, algorithms, user interfaces, search & retrieval, personalization & recommenders, navigation, information architecture.

Track 4 – Information and Knowledge Management
Chair:  Robert Sandusky, University of Illinois, Chicago
Co-Chair:  Kenneth R. Fleischmann, University of Maryland
Information and knowledge creation, transfer and use at the personal, group, organizational and societal levels; expertise, insights, and judgment in organizations; the management of the processes and systems that create, acquire, organize, store, distribute, and use information; knowledge capital; social networking; knowledge sharing and communities of practice; business intelligence; content management, document management; workflow management; collaboration systems; portals; groupware; information and knowledge preservation and storage.

Track 5 – Information Use
Chair:  Mia Lustria, Florida State University
Co-Chair:  Michelle Kazmer, Florida State University
Nature of information and how information is used to help solve problems and aid decision making; information literacy, reading 

Track 6 – Economic, Social, and Political Issues
Chair:  Nadia Caidi, University of Toronto
Co-Chair:  Steven Jackson, University of Michigan
Copyright issues, policies and laws; information policy; privacy; personal rights vs. freedom of information; surveillance; regulation; international information flow& issues; spam 

Because each of these tracks represents a generic aspect of information science, each may be focused by additional elements such as types of:

• Organizations – schools, universities, government, private corporations 
• Information – by topic, genre, size, medium, etc. 
• Technology – PDAs, computers, smart phones, wearable technologies, blogs, wikis, ebooks, hypermedia 
• Information consumers – from kids to seniors, and from grunts to managers, from individuals to groups 
• Information workers – librarians, database and system developers, information managers, information architects
• Contexts – entertainment, edutainment, learning, social, mission critical, etc.
• Research theories and paradigms – from uses and gratification to Zipf’s Law
• Methods – qualitative, qualitative, mixed, modelling, etc.