President’s Message, October 2026

Greetings to the ASIS&T community!

I look forward to our gathering in Bangkok in less than a month. Many of you are probably putting finishing touches on presentations and papers and packing lists, mulling how to balance conference, beach, and monsoon gear! There’s a lot to think about as we prepare. Most of us will be crossing borders, as the conference theme suggests. While it may take passports or visas to cross into Thailand, our opportunities to cross intellectual borders are less formal. Step into any paper or poster session or panel, and you’ll be welcomed to a new world of ideas. We are all citizens of a shared commonwealth of information scholarship and practice. There will be many chances to engage in global dialogue.

As president, I have insight into the extraordinary amount of effort and problem-solving it takes to organize an event of this size and complexity—far more effort than I would have guessed as a regular attendee listening to papers and enjoying receptions! The program committee, Lydia Middleton, and the staff have taken on that effort with cheerful goodwill and great skill. We owe them all our thanks.

As the annual meeting concludes, my final duty as president will be to hand over ASIS&T leadership to our new president, Marlene Holmner.  Marlene is an accomplished researcher and scholar, with a broad range of interests in both social and technological aspects of information science. And she is a very nice and very competent person. ASIS&T is in good presidential hands with Marlene.

Marlene and I will team up with Lydia Middleton to lead the launch of our Information Futures Summit.  This invitational event brings together thought leaders from our community to work together on defining and addressing the grand information challenges of our time and to think about grand solutions and how ASIS&T can help devise those solutions. This is the first of a series of events that will be hosted around the globe in the next year as we continue to cross international and intellectual borders in pursuit of a better information future.

I look forward to seeing many of you in Bangkok in just a few days!

Maria Bonn, ASIS&T President