Join the new Diversity Committee

The NASIG Board has voted to establish a new Diversity Committee, with Del Williams (California State University, Northridge) as the first chair. NASIG is now seeking candidates to join the committee for a term of two years, beginning immediately.

To apply, send an email by Aug. 3 to kristen_wilson@ncsu.edu. Your email should include a short description of your interest in the committee and any specific qualifications or experience you have working with diversity initiatives and related areas. Prior experience is not required.

The committee’s initial assignment will be to define its work. Specifically, committee members will have the following initial charge:

• Recommend a permanent committee name, develop a final committee charge, and establish a guiding document for the work of the committee.
• Develop strategies to increase diversity in NASIG membership, leadership, and award winners.
• Collaborate with the Continuing Education Committee to Initiate and promote educational opportunities that address issues in diversity and social justice.

If you have questions, contact Kristen Wilson.

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Presenter Feedback for NASIG 2018

Thank you to all who filled out the 2018 conference evaluation survey. If you presented at the 2018 NASIG Conference in Atlanta, GA and are interested in receiving feedback on your presentation, please send your request to the Evaluation & Assessment Committee at evaluation@nasig.org.  Remember, for confidentiality purposes, you will only receive your individual ratings and not those of co-presenters.

Cheers,
Michael Fernandez
Chair, Evaluation & Assessment Committee

Video of Vision III: Lisa Macklin – Open Access: How Accessible Is It?

 

The Budapest Open Access Initiative made the first public statement of open access principles in 2002. In the more than 15 years since, open access publications have proliferated. The ideals of the open access movement to make open access the default method of sharing research, however, have not yet been fully realized. In this presentation, Lisa will examine where we are in the open access movement; the successes we can celebrate and the challenges still to be overcome. She will also posit that we may have reached a moment in the open access movement when it is time to expand on our conception of open access and consider accessibility more broadly. Librarians have been central players in the open access movement, but is there more we could or should be doing? Should we broaden our definition of access to be more expansive and include accessibility? As we close the conference, we’ll consider ways we can all contribute to making open access more accessible.

Video of Vision II: Lauren Smith – Communities of praxis: transforming access to information for equity

Access and accessibility to knowledge for research and professional practice has implications for social equity and democracy. Library and information services have many opportunities to make knowledge discoverable, retrievable and useable, but on many occasions are instead (actively or passively) complicit in maintaining a status quo that feeds social inequality. In this presentation, Lauren will combine work by key theorists in the field, empirical research into information experiences and practices, and her own experiences of establishing an evidence search and summary service for the social services workforce of over 200,000 across Scotland. She will explore issues of access, accessibility and user experience to consider the social justice implications of practices in library and information services, including scholarly communications and systems.

This talk will articulate how imbalanced power relations across librarianship and the systems we promote reflect those of society, and offer insights into how, through evidence-based, reflective practice, we can harness the transformative potential of library and information services to improve outcomes for society through democratising access to knowledge. It will explore how critical approaches to user experience, privacy and openness could act as as springboards to change structures within library and information services. With these tools we may mitigate against the inequalities caused by problems such as inaccessibility, algorithmic bias and ideologically-driven policies in the context of educational and workplace information practices, and maximise beneficial outcomes for the public good.

Video of Vision Session I: Sören Auer – Towards an Open Research Knowledge Graph

 

The document-oriented workflows in science have reached (or already exceeded) the limits of adequacy as highlighted for example by recent discussions on the increasing proliferation of scientific literature and the reproducibility crisis. Now it is possible to rethink this dominant paradigm of document-centered knowledge exchange and transform it into knowledge-based information flows by representing and expressing knowledge through semantically rich, interlinked knowledge graphs.

The core of the establishment of knowledge-based information flows is the creation and evolution of information models for the establishment of a common understanding of data and information between the various stakeholders as well as the integration of these technologies into the infrastructure and processes of search and knowledge exchange in the research library of the future. By integrating these information models into existing and new research infrastructure services, the information structures that are currently still implicit and deeply hidden in documents can be made explicit and directly usable. This has the potential to revolutionize scientific work because information and research results can be seamlessly interlinked with each other and better mapped to complex information needs. Also research results become directly comparable and easier to reuse.

REMINDER: 2018 Conference Evaluation Survey due 7/15

For those who attended NASIG in Atlanta but have yet to fill out the evaluation survey, it’s not too late to share your feedback!

The link to the online evaluation survey is available at https://www.surveymonkey.com/r/nasig18 and also posted on the NASIG homepage.

Conference attendees who complete the online evaluation survey will be eligible to enter a drawing to win a $50 Amazon gift card.

The deadline for filling out the survey is July 15, 2018 at 5:00 pm EST.

Thank you for #NASIG18

Hello everyone,

I wanted to take a moment now to thank everyone who’s volunteered this past year and everyone who came to #NASIG18.

While many people were formally recognized during that event, I know there are many more who worked in various ways to support the organization. Thank you to you all.

As I noted in my closing remarks, it has been a great privilege to serve you as president this past year. Thank you for giving me that honor.

Everything we do as a non-profit membership organization is inherently collective and collaborative.

Together we are powerful, and collectively we will transform the information community. (A fitting theme for #NASIG18 as well as our organizational tag line.) If you are not already involved in NASIG work, I hope you will join us and help make that happen.

Warmly,

Steve Oberg