Designing a user‐centered conference for user‐centered information professionals: The story of InfoCamp Seattle

Ching-chih Chen, professor in the Simmons Graduate School of Library and Information Science and an international leader in digital library research and development, is the 2008 recipient of the American Library Association Beta Phi Mu Award. The honor is presented annually to a library school faculty member or individual for distinguished service in librarianship education. Chen is a longtime member of ASIS&T, where she has served in numerous local and national capacities in service to the field of information science. The award jury responsible for Chen’s selection was “extremely impressed” with her “profound impact on the field of global librarianship,” as well as her devotion to her students and her record of publications and presentations. n And then get ready for the 10th IA Summit, March 18-22, 2009, in Memphis. But it’s not just the IA community benefiting from cutting-edge conferences sponsored by ASIS&T. The ASIS&T Annual Meeting continues to address the broader fields and boundaries of information science and practice. Coming up in late October in Columbus, People Transforming Information – Information Transforming People will use the lens of the human and social condition to seek a better understanding of the impact of the new information environment made possible by the digital world. Check the ASIS&T website regularly for updated information on the ASIS&T conferences. F or nine years now, the ASIS&T Information Architecture Summit has proven itself as the premier gathering place for information architects. The ninth annual summit, held in April in Miami, attracted over 600 attendees presenting, discussing or just absorbing cutting-edge information on social networking, gaming, patterns, tagging, taxonomies and a wide range of IA tools and techniques. As one attendee put it, “Jared M. Spool’s opening keynote on Journey to the Center of Design and Andrew Hinton’s closing plenary on Linkosophy were amazing bookends for a great conference.” Next up for the IA community is the fourth EuroIA, this year to be held in Amsterdam, September 26-27. EuroIA will explore the theme of Redrawing the Map, between countries and online as we look to forge new international alliances to adapt traditional deliverables to the needs of a Web 2.0 world.