President’s Message, July 2025
The Australian band Crowded House had a famous song, ‘Always Take the Weather With You’. To be honest, I wish they would take the weather as it’s raining again in Glasgow. So many news stories now are around weather: floods, droughts, heat waves, and loss of natural habitats. Climate action is one of the Grand Challenges for the United Nations and many funding bodies. Like other grand challenges, such as reduced inequalities, or education for all, Information Science underpins most solutions: measuring and monitoring data, analysing trends, producing reliable and accurate information, generating public debates, disseminating key messages, creating archives, abstracting, synthesising, providing evidence bases, creating policy, informing media and decision-makers and creating novel technologies. These challenges themselves are not necessarily information challenges, but they cannot be solved without information science and our contributions.
All these challenges are human challenges, and I believe that our contributions to these and other societal challenges reflect the best in us as people and professionals. Earlier this year, as part of our strategic plan development, we asked you to vote on our organisational values. We thank you for all the input on this process which informed the Board’s activities to best represent what you see as important for ASIS&T.
In the final selection, we have chosen as our values Collaboration, Empowerment, Impact, Inclusivity, and Stewardship. You can read fuller descriptions in the ASIS&T Draft Strategic Plan Open for Comment, below there are some indicative behaviours associated with each value which will give a flavour of what the value means for ASIS&T and its activities.
Collaboration: seeking the best in other disciplines, creating research collaborations, inspiring those around us, and creating opportunities for members to discover new collaborators.
Empowerment: supporting all members to realise their potential, empowering others to leverage information for positive outcomes, and defending the rights of those who need information to access it freely.
Impact: facilitating the interaction between research and practice, valuing activities that translate research into practical initiatives to tackle society's grand challenges, supporting research that has significant theoretical innovation, methodological creativity, practical application, or technological advancement and being public advocates for Information Science.
Inclusivity: putting people's information wants, needs, and experiences at the forefront of information science research and information service design, appreciating diversity and promoting inclusive information access, and creating inclusive and welcoming spaces.
Stewardship: being committed to safeguarding the environment through thoughtful information solutions, supporting the preservation of knowledge and wisdom from across the world, and engaging in thoughtful, sustainable, and ethical leadership.
These values describe a thoughtful, principled, engaged and outward looking organisation and I think these really describe well the ASIS&T membership and its contributions to societal needs.
You recently voted in a talented group of colleagues onto the ASIS&T Board of Directors. Please join me in welcoming and congratulating Marlene Holmner as President-Elect, Rebekah Willson and Isto Huvila as Directors-at-Large and Chris Cunningham who will continue as our Treasurer. All these colleagues are well known to ASIS&T members and will enhance your Board. Their term will begin after the Annual Meeting in Washington DC in November. We are grateful to Crystal Fulton, our immediate Past-President, and the whole Nominations Committee for their efforts in this election. Our new board will have many important tasks, not least implementing the new strategic plan and, if the SLA merger is approved by ASIS&T and SLA members, to implement this merger. Sleeves will be rolled up in November!
Other important news is the ASIS&T awards, and we have seen a wonderful set of awards announced so far. Many congratulations to all the winners, some of whom are in the early stages of their research career and pioneering new directions for the field, others are more seasoned pioneers receiving awards for sustained excellence. I will not name names regarding who is fresh young talent and who are older hands! Our thanks to the members of the Awards and Honours Committee, led by Diane Velasquez, and members of all the award juries who provide significant time and insight into reading all the submissions. This is a hefty task, even when one is reading the best of ASIS&T, and we are very grateful for this service. We also congratulate the 2025 class of New Leaders, Rawan AlMakinah, SUNY Albany, Jane Bartley, SUNY Buffalo, Ayinde Lateef, Florida State University, Hassan Mortada, SUNY Buffalo and Le Yang, University of Oregon.
We are gearing up to the next ASIS&T AM which promises to be an exciting meeting. Already some information is available at https://www.asist.org/meetings-events/am/am25/am25-schedule-at-a-glance/. Registration is open at https://www.asist.org/meetings-events/am/am25/am25-reg-rates-and-policies/ with early registration ending on 7th August.
Maria Bonn, our President-Elect, has been leading the new Strategic Plan Development which is available for comment at ASIS&T Draft Strategic Plan Open for Comment. We do welcome feedback on this plan as it will guide our activities over the next three years.
Once again, I very much thank the Lydia and our colleagues at Global Management Partners, our leaders, officers, and members of the various ASIS&T SIGs, Chapters, and other groups for their contributions to ASIS&T. I really believe that the ASIS&T community is a very precious and important one for our field and all your contributions make it so.
I started talking about the weather (well, I am British) and have just been reminded of the Scottish band Garbage’s most famous song ‘Only Happy When It Rains’. I guess it’s just a matter of perspective….
Have a great week
Ian