Announcement of the 2011 ASIS&T SIG-III International Paper Contest

The Special Interest Group on International Information Issues (SIG-III) of the American Society for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T) is pleased to announce its eleventh competition for papers to be submitted for the 2011 Annual Meeting, which will take place in New Orleans, Louisiana, October 7-12, 2011. ( http://www.asis.org/asist2011/am11cfp.html )

Building from the overall conference theme, the theme for this year’s paper contest is:

“Bridging the Gulf: Communication and Information in Society, Technology, and Work”. Papers could discuss issues, policies and case studies on specific aspects of the theme from a global and/or international perspective. Topics include, but are not limited to, the following core areas:

1. Intercultural Information Ethics: Critical reflection on the ethical challenges related to the global and cross-cultural production, storage, and distribution of information, as well as the ethical dimensions of the global development and implementation of information systems, infrastructures, and policies.

2. Information Behavior: Information needs, information seeking, information gaps and sensemaking in various contexts including work, interests or every-day life activities by individuals or groups.

3. Knowledge Organization: Indexing, index construction, indexing languages, thesaurus construction, terminology, classification of information in any form, tagging (expert, userbased, automatic), filtering, metadata, standards for metadata, information architecture.

4. Information Systems, Interactivity and Design: How people use and communicate with information systems; the design, use and evaluation of interactive information technologies and systems, including interfaces and algorithms; search and retrieval, browsing, visualization, personalization.

5. Information and Knowledge Management: Information and knowledge creation, transfer and use at the personal, group, organizational and societal levels. The management of the processes and systems that create, acquire, organize, store, distribute, and use information and/or knowledge. Selected papers will be published in the International Journal of Information Management.

6. Information Use: How people re-purpose existing knowledge from a variety of sources (scientific, humanities, news, family, friends, colleagues), forms (articles, books, video, audio, tweets), locations (work, home, in transit) and mediums (cell-phones, PDAs, digital libraries) to advance knowledge, solve problems, improve information literacy, and learn.

7. Information and Society: Economic, Political, Social Issues: Copyright issues, policies and laws; national and international information policies; privacy and security; economics of information, personal rights vs. freedom of information; surveillance; globalization and the flows of information; computerization movements; social informatics.

Selection Criteria

There will be up to six winners who will be selected by a panel of judges including: Maqsood Shaheen (IRC, US Embassy Islamabad), Johannes Britz (UW-Milwaukee), Maria Haigh (UW-Milwaukee), Hong Xu (University of Pittsburg), Catherine Johnson (Western Ontario), Anindita Paul (University of Missouri), and Borchuluun Yadamsuren (University of Missouri).

The judging criteria will be based on:

1. Originality of paper in the developing world and global information ecosystem (originality of the project described, etc.)

2. Relevance to the paper contest theme

3. Quality of argument, presentation and organization

Eligibility & Information for authors

Only papers by a principal author who is a citizen of, and resides in a developing country are eligible. Winners in the 2007-2010 contests are not eligible. The papers should be original, unpublished, and submitted in English. We encourage submissions from librarians, information and network specialists, and educators involved in the creation, representation, maintenance, exchange, discovery, delivery, and use of digital information.

Award

The award for each winner is a two-year individual membership in ASIS&T. In the case of multiple authors, the principal author will be awarded the ASIS&T membership. In addition, depending on SIG III fundraising for this competition, the first place winner will be rewarded a minimum of $1,000 toward travel, conference registration, and accommodations while attending the ASIS&T Annual Conference in New Orleans, Louisiana, October 7-12, 2011.

Style

The international paper contest committee requires that submissions follow the International Information and Library Review instructions to authors. Detailed information is available under the heading, Guide for Authors at:

http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/622845/authorinstructions

Publishing opportunities

Submitted papers will be considered for inclusion in a special issue of the International Information and Library Review, subject to the usual peer refereeing process, for that journal.

ASIS&T Copyright Policy

ASIS&T will have the non-exclusive right to publish any of the papers submitted on its web site or in print, with ownership and all other rights remaining with the author.

Deadline for submission of full papers: Authors are invited to submit manuscripts, not to exceed 5,000 words, by May 31, 2011, to Maqsood Shaheen at ShaheenMA [at] gmail.com, preferably as Microsoft Word or PDF attachments.