Professional responsibility, power, recruitment and retention of members in the society

Editor's note: Phillip Edwards is one of two recipients of the 2008 James M. Cretsos Leadership Award, which honors new ASIS&T members (members for less than seven years) who have demonstrated outstanding leadership qualities. The Bulletin has asked him to describe his ASIS&T experiences and the motivations for his service to the Society. I t is a great honor to be selected as a recipient, along with Elise Lewis, of the 2008 James M. Cretsos Leadership Award. (Elise has a written a wonderful essay about her experiences for the February/March 2009 issue of the Bulletin [1].) I never had a chance to meet Jim in person but have learned about him through his writing and the stories that other ASIS&T members tell about their interactions with him. In this column, I wanted to explore not only the impact he had our on field but also to reflect upon avenues through which the Society could better carry forward some of his ideals. When Jim was the chairman of the Professional Enhancement Committee in the mid-1970s, he took a particularly impassioned stance on professional responsibilities of ASIS&T members: Certainly, an organization such as ours, whose members can control the flow of information, has enormous power…Since many members of our profession are not accustomed to thinking of themselves as powerful, there is a strong tendency to ignore or even flee from responsibility for the impact of their work. Undoubtedly, some of our members are totally unaware of the eventual consequences of what they do. ([2], p. 211) Although the intervening years yielded a set of professional guidelines for members of the Society [3], the notions of power and responsibility in our field are still ones that bear upon us, particularly as ASIS&T deals with some very pressing challenges in terms of recruitment and retention of members. I suppose that interjecting a bit of personal narrative might illustrate how these themes – power, responsibility, recruitment and retention – could impact the sustainability of the Society. I joined ASIS&T as a student member in 2002. At the time, I was a master's student at the University of Michigan, and I had just completed my B.S. in chemistry the previous year. When I noted the opportunity to apply for a travel award to subsidize my attendance at the ASIS&T Annual Meeting, sponsored by Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS) and awarded by SIG/STI, I applied. I met a …