Dirk Lewandowski
Candidate for President-Elect
Dirk Lewandowski has been an engaged member of ASIS&T since joining the association in 2009. Since then, he has served in multiple roles in the organization, including Chair of the European Chapter 2019/20, when he led establishing ASIS&T's Information Science Trends conference series. The European Chapter won the Chapter of the Year Award for the work done in that year. Dirk has chaired the Research in Information Science Award jury and the Best Information Science Book jury. He served as a member of the Publications Committee, the Chapter Assembly Advisory Committee, and several award juries. He is a member of the editorial board of the Journal of the Association for Information Science & Technology.
Dirk is a professor of information science at the Hamburg University of Applied Sciences, Germany, and a visiting research fellow at Lund University, Sweden. His research interests are Web information retrieval, search engine user behaviour, and search engines' role in society. His work has been published in some of the leading information science journals, including JASIST. From 2013 to 2020, he was the editor of Aslib Journal of Information Management.
Dirk has served as an expert to, among others, the High Court of Justice (UK) and the German Parliament. Having worked as an information professional for more than six years, he is interested in helping to bridge the research-practice gap.
You can learn more about him at https://searchstudies.org/dirk
I would be delighted and sincerely honoured to serve ASIS&T in the role of President-Elect. I am fully committed to ASIS&T's vision and strategic plan for 2020-2025. If elected, I will work hard on fulfilling the four goals of the strategic plan:
- In terms of growing and engaging membership, I will especially work on making ASIS&T more attractive to members worldwide. It is paramount to continue the way to make ASIS&T a truly international organization. A key to achieving this is strengthening the ties between global and regional activities, i.e., better supporting SIGs and regional chapters in their activities. Another critical way to increase membership is to make the association more attractive to practitioners. I commit to establishing measures to attract practitioners to the mutual benefit of academic research and practice.
- New ASIS&T publications are on the way, and we will see the return of ARIST as well as the new Information Matters already in the coming year. To further strengthen ASIS&T's publication portfolio, I will work with the board and the editors on maintaining and increasing the scholarly quality of the publications. Additionally, I am committed to ASIS&T publications being an outlet for all research in the field of information science. I will work with the board and the editors on making publications more open for all types of research and research methods used in the field.
- I will support the strategic goal of improving knowledge-sharing opportunities by working on making ASIS&T meetings more inclusive, making participation easy for members who cannot attend in person, and fostering attractive new formats for symposia and other gatherings. Regarding other planned knowledge-sharing activities like webinars and virtual meetings, I will work with ASIS&T members on making these as attractive as possible.
- It is paramount for ASIS&T to cooperate with affiliate information associations while making sure to keep its unique profile. I will strengthen cooperation with associations like iSchools and ALISE and extend collaboration to national information science organizations in different countries. Furthermore, it will be paramount to establish cooperation with associations with overlapping target groups, like some ACM SIGs.
I firmly believe that information science research and practice can contribute to solving the grand challenges societies worldwide face. Therefore, I think ASIS&T is well advised to establish how information science can contribute to addressing global challenges, as described in the United Nation's Sustainable Development Goals. However, we also need to verify the grand challenges within our own field and develop strategies and research programmes to address them.
An association like ASIS&T can only prosper when we can convince our prospective and current members of our value proposition. I am committed to working with ASIS&T leaders and the membership on preserving our value propositions and exploring new ones.