Archive for December, 2010

I’m not physically in Hawaii, so the title of this post may be construed to be a little misleading.  But the 44th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences (HICSS-44), which is always the first major conference of the year, is ready to kick off next week.  Here are the tracks that will meet during the conference:

• Collaboration Systems and Technologies
• Decision Technology, Mobile Technologies and Service Science
• Digital Media: Content and Communication
• Electronic Government
• Electric Power Systems: Smart Grids, Engineering, Economics, Security
• Information Technology in Health Care
• Internet and the Digital Economy
• Knowledge Systems
• Organizational Systems and Technology
• Software Technology

Although several of them may not be very relevant to information professionals, enough of them are to make the conference well worth the effort to attend.   For example, the Digital Media track will be keynoted by Clifford Lynch, Director of the Coalition for Networked Information (CNI), who will be speaking on “Digital Documents and Social Scale Systems: Some Speculations on the Next Ten Years”.  You can find more details on the tracks at the conference website, especially the Themes and Tracks and Minitracks pages.

Cynthia Breazeal

The opening keynote address will be presented by Cynthia Breazeal, Associate Professor at the MIT Media Lab and founder of the Personal Robots Group.  She will be speaking on “The Social Side of Robotics”.

Larry Smarr

The HICSS-44 Distinguished Lecture will be by Larry Smarr, Harry E. Gruber Professor, Department of Computer Science and Engineering, University of California San Diego (UCSD), and Director,  California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2), a UCSD/UC Irvine partnership.  The title of his lecture is “Building a Global Collaboration System for Data-Intensive Discovery”.

Unfortunately, I won’t be at HICSS, but if you will be, I’d be delighted to have your observations, which you can leave as a Comment to this posting.

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today and Conference Circuit Blog Editor

Although February is not one of the busiest conference months, it does feature some very noteworthy ones.

Information Online 2011

The major online conference for Australasia and the surrounding area occurs in Sydney on February 1-3.  Organized by the Australian Library and Information Association (ALIA), Information Online occurs every two years and enjoys a large attendance and notable speakers.   The 2011 opening keynote speaker will be Jim McKierlie, CEO of Bullseye Digital, an Australian digital services agency.  Other keynoters include Michael Mace, Principal of Rubicon Consulting, speaking on “E-Books and the Future of Publishing”; Iarla Flynn, Head of Public Policy for Google’s Australia and New Zealand office, speaking on “Information in the Internet Age”; and Sarah Houghton-Jan, Digital Futures Manager at the San Jose Public Library and author of the well-known blog, Librarian in Black speaking on “Digital Libraries: the Phoenix Rising From the Ashes”.  [Watch for a full report on Information Online 2011 in a future issue of Information Today.]

O’Reilly Tools of Change (TOC) For Publishing

The 5th O’Reilly TOC Conference will be in New York on February 14-16.  With well over 1,000 attendees each year, TOC has become a major “must attend” event on the conference calendar and has been a sellout for its entire existence.  This year’s conference, “Publishing Without Boundaries”, begins with a day of workshops, followed by the main conference on February 15-16.  A stellar lineup of keynote speakers has been recruited, and sessions on cutting-edge topics have been organized.  New this year is a “Publishing Startup Showcase”, in which approximately 20 startups will conduct demonstrations.  A panel of judges will choose the best ones, and attendees will also have an opportunity to vote for their favorite.   The winners will then present their products in detail to the audience.  [Watch for live blog coverage here.]

NFAIS Annual Conference

The NFAIS Annual Conference (Philadelphia, PA, February 27 – March 1 ) has a most appropriate theme for the current hot topic in the information world:  “Taming The Information Tsunami: The New World of Discovery”.  The opening keynote speaker will be Dan Gillmor, author of We the Media: Grassroots Journalism by the People, for the People (O’Reilly Media, 2004) and Director, Knight School of Digital Media Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University.  His topic will be “Challenges to Information Discovery in a World of Abundance”.  Susan Feldman, Research Vice President, Search and Discovery Technologies, IDC, and several other speakers will follow with further looks at information abundance and overload.  The Miles Conrad Lecture will be presented by Dr. Ben Shneiderman, Founding Director of the Human-Computer Interaction Laboratory, and member of the Institute for Advanced Computer Studies at the University of Maryland.  The final keynote (speaker to be determined) will examine the future of information discovery.  The NFAIS conference is always highly relevant and stimulating, and this year’s event promises to continue that tradition.

Personal Digital Archiving

Libraries and corporations are not the only entities engaged in creating digital archives of their data.  With the widespread proliferation of digital cameras, scanners, and cell phone cameras, individuals are also creating vast digital archives of personal data.  And photos are not the only records they are digitizing; personal records such as financial and medical data are also included.  The Personal Digital Archiving 2011 conference (PDA 2011, February 24-25, San Francisco) will examine this growing phenomenon, including technical, social, and economic issues.  The conference website notes,

“…the early work of the Nobel Prize winners of the 2030s is likely to be digital today, and therefore at risk in ways that previous scientific and literary creations were not. And it isn’t just Nobel winners that matter: the lives of all of us will be preserved in ways not previously possible.”

The conference will be hosted by The Internet Archive, and one would be hard put to imagine a more appropriate organization to do so.

iConference 2011

The iConference is “an annual gathering of researchers and professionals from around the world who share the common goal of making a difference through the study of people, information, and technology.”  The 6th annual conference (Seattle, WA, February 8-11) will feature Colin Burke and Susan Dumais as keynoters, over 85 peer-reviewed presentations, poster sessions, and workshops.  Burke is a historian of information science from the University of Maryland, and Dumais is Principal Researcher and manager of the Context, Learning and User Experience for Search (CLUES) Group at Microsoft Research and has published widely on human-computer interaction and information retrieval.

BOBCATSSS 2011

The 2011 BOBCATSS conference (the name is an acronym of the first letters of the nine cities of the universities that organized the initial conference in 1993) will be January 31 – February 2 in Szombathely, Hungary and is entitled “Finding New Ways”.  The conference is organized by library and information science students from universities in Hungary, Norway, and Austria.  It focuses on the new ways people use libraries and the new ways that librarians work.

Society Meetings

Here are some society meetings scheduled for February:

• The Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) has organized its 7th Annual Librarian Focus Group: “A Forum for Publishers and Librarians” (February 1, Washington, DC) at which a panel of 6 librarians will reply to questions from publishers and vendors.  The main focus will be on the continuing economic turmoil, trends in pricing and licensing, open access, and similar topics.
• The AAP/PSP (Association of American Publishers (AAP), Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division (PSP)) 2011 annual conference immediately follows the SSP focus group on February 2-4 and features presentations on such topics as the use of social media, copyright reform, open access, and disambiguation of author names from a number of visionary players in the publishing industry.
• The keynote address at the 2011 Annual Conference of the Association of Subscription Agents & Intermediaries (ASA, London, February 21-22), “Recession is the Mother of Invention”, is entitled “The Subscription is Dead:  Long Live…?”  Topics of some of the other sessions include patron access to e-books, library-publisher negotiations, the future of research communication, and publishing technologies.
• The International Council for Scientific and Technical Information (ICSTI) will hold its winter meeting at Microsoft’s headquarters in Redmond, WA on February 6-7, followed by a workshop on February 8 entitled “Multimedia and Visualization Innovations for Science”.
• The Asian Chapter of SLA and the Japan Special Libraries Association (JSLA) have collaborated in organizing the 2nd International Conference of Asian Special Libraries (ICoASL, February 10-12, Tokyo), with the theme “Building User Trust: The Key to Special libraries Renaissance at the Digital Era”.  Some of the topics to be discussed are new special libraries services, branding, and library management.
• The Music Library Association will hold its 80th Annual Meeting in Philadelphia, PA on February 9-12.  The conference theme is “Born Digital: A New Frontier for Music Libraries”.

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today and Conference Circuit Blog Editor

The School of Information and Library Science (SILS) and School of Government (SOG) at the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill (UNC-CH) will hold a day-long seminar called “The Curation of Social Media as a Public Asset” on January 21, 2011.  Topics will include The Library of Congress’ Twitter Acquisition, NARA’s and the State of North Carolina’s social media policies, legal issues related to curating social media as a public asset, and topics surrounding self-disclosure and strategic policy for public records social media.

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today and Conference Circuit Blog Editor

Now that 2010 is passing into history, we can look at some interesting statistical data on its conferences.

I listed 651 conferences held in 2010 on the ITI Conference Calendar, and mentioned 246 of them in my 11 monthly columns.  As shown in the figure below, 2010 followed the usual pattern, with the busiest periods of the year in the spring and fall. The spring period, April through June, had 200 conferences, and the fall period, September through November, had 224.  Each of these periods accounts for approximately 1/3 of the yearly total.  And also as usual, dips were observed in the year-end months and in July.

Conferences were held in 209 different cities in 21 countries.  Here are the cities in which 5 or more conferences were held.

London heads the list, as it usually does, followed by New York, and Washington.  The reason Bilbao, Spain appears is that it was the location of the DEXA Society’s annual event, at which several co-located conferences occur.

On a country basis, the US had the most conferences, with 143.  Countries hosting 4 or more conferences are shown below.  Four conferences were virtual—held online only.

Here are the organizations that organized more than 5 conferences in 2010.

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today and Conference Circuit Blog Editor

O’Reilly Media has released an initial list of keynote speakers for its 5th annual Tools of Change (TOC) Conference.  The conference theme is “Publishing Without Boundaries”.  According to the conference website, the following will be of particular interest:

• The opportunities and challenges of a global digital marketplace
• What’s up and coming in digital design and production
• Shifts in business models and modes of delivery
• Legal and ethical issues for 21st century publishers: dealing with territorial rights in a digital world; IP reform; fair use; creative commons; consumer privacy; and copyright
• The importance of capturing and understanding consumer data
• Standardization of content identifiers and metadata
• Whither big box and indie brick and mortars? Will indies establish a foothold in the etail space?
• The many issues surrounding digital content for libraries
• Meeting (and anticipating) consumer demands
• Will dedicated devices flourish or perish?
• What are the predictions for winners and losers in the mobile space?
• Advances in EPUB
• The how-tos (as well as pros and cons) of books as apps
• Are any parts of the legacy publishing model worth saving?
• What it really takes to create and operate an effective B2C publishing business

This is an impressive list indeed!  But then, we wouldn’t expect anything less from O’Reilly, given the excellence of its past TOC conferences!

Early registration rates end January 11.

I hope to be there covering TOC for The Conference Circuit; check back here frequently for developments leading up to the conference.

Don Hawkins
Columnist, Information Today and Conference Circuit Blog Editor