TPDL 2019 is the 23rd International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries. Chaired by Trond Aalberg of Oslo Metropolitan University and Adam Jatowt of Kyoto University, TPDL 2019 attempts to facilitate establishing connections and convergences between diverse research communities such as Digital Humanities, Information Sciences and others that could benefit from (and contribute to) ecosystems offered by digital libraries and repositories. The conference takes September 9-12, 2019 in Oslo, Norway.

Under the general theme “Connecting with Communities”, TPDL 2019 invites submissions for scientific and research work in the following categories: Full Papers, Short Papers, Posters and Demonstrations, Workshops and Tutorials, Panels and Doctoral Consortium.

Click here to visit the conference website for more information.

Wei Gao (MSIS ’01), alumna of the UNC School of Information and Library Science (SILS) and Vice President, Technical Advisor to Amazon CEO Jeff Bezos, has been named one of the Top 50 Most Powerful Women in Technology by the National Diversity Council. The list features executive female leaders in the technology industry who drive change, innovate, and inspire others to succeed while contributing to business growth. The 2019 honorees were recognized at the 15th Annual Diversity and Leadership Conference on April 11 in Dallas.

Gao was promoted to her VP Technical Advisor role in November 2018. Executives in the position are often referred to as Bezos’ “shadow” because they accompany him to all meetings, according to a report from CNBC.

Click here for more on this story and other news from the UNC iSchool.

UMD iSchool MLIS alumnus Holly McIntyre has been named archivist of the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Studies, one of 11 NASA centers. NASA Goddard was established 60 years ago, and McIntyre is its first archivist, meaning she starts out with a considerable backlog of materials to be collected, organized and securely stored.

Although NASA keeps permanent materials in the National Archives (NARA), according to McIntyre this only applies to the 1 to 3 percent of records created by government agencies that are considered permanent. “The rest is considered temporary and will be disposed of (after a certain amount of time),” says McIntyre. It’s McIntyre’s job to separate Goddards’s created records into three categories: these permanent records, temporary, and non-record. Temporary material includes working records that allow someone to do their job. These might be copies of permanent series, or different versions that aren’t necessarily the final version. Non-record material is anything that is ephemeral: posters given out to employees, stickers, pins, personal photographs, etc. The Goddard Archives’ holdings are compiled of historically significant temporary and non-record material.

Who uses the Goddard Archives? “The first group would be people working here – like scientists and engineers who may want to see their own history so that they can build on the legacy that came before them,” says McIntrye. “The second group are members of the Goddard center who want to see culturally important or historically significant records. And finally, space historians, researchers, and students.”

McIntyre worked at NARA while she was an MLS student. Soon after graduating, she started working with special media in the Motion Picture, Sound, and Video Unit. Because she was working with “special media,” she was able to do all parts of the archival process: appraisal, accessioning, processing, etc. NASA was one of the agencies she did appraisal and accessioning for.

Creating an archive from the ground up is a constant learning experience. When she was first starting out, McIntyre contacted other centers with archives to see what they were doing and what their records look like compared to her records. She needed “to start learning what a science archives looks like, not to be confused with data centers that take raw data that come down from space.”

Click here to read the full story on the UMD iSchool website.

The School of Communication and Information (SC&I) at Rutgers University is excited to announce the launch of the new journal, Information and Learning Sciences, co-edited by LIS faculty Rebecca B. Reynolds along with Dr. Samuel K. W. Chu of the University of Hong Kong, and published by Emerald, UK.

Upcoming Special Issues include: Call for papers – Learning in Low-tech, Information-rich Environments; Call for papers – Foregrounding Play: Games and Playful Engagement in the Study and Design of Formal and Informal Learning Environments.

More at https://www.emeraldinsight.com/loi/ils

The iSchools, an organization of 100 information schools worldwide, has issued the following statement:

“The iSchools condemn the shootings in New Zealand and all such acts of hate and violence in the world. Together with our colleagues in New Zealand and with colleagues in the Muslim community in all of our countries, we mourn those who died. We offer our deepest sympathy to the family and friends of those killed or injured in the attack and to the people of Christchurch at this time.”

The worldwide iSchools membership includes universities in Muslim-majority countries. The iSchools organization supports academic freedom everywhere as essential to scientific inquiry and the advancement of knowledge.

The School of Communication and Information at Rutgers University will host the upcoming CSST Summer Institute, supporting late-phase doctoral students, post-docs and early career emerging scholars in the socio-technical systems and critical informatics research domains. The event takes place June 18-22, 2019.

Now 10 years running, the event will be co-organized by Rutgers LIS professor Rebecca Reynolds and Dr. Morgan Ames of the UC Berkeley iSchool. It will be held at the Rutgers University Inn and Conference Center, close to NYC, Newark Airport, and major transportation hubs.

See the online CFP for details, including the list of mentors, and application instructions. The application deadline is March 31, 2019.

The event is ACM SIGCHI Sponsored, with additional support from iSchools-members Rutgers, University of Missouri, and Syracuse University.

A Doctoral Consortium workshop will be held as part of the upcoming Joint Conference on Digital Libraries in Urbana-Champaign, Illinois. The Consortium takes place on June 2, 2019, and call for papers and topics has been issued with an abstract deadline of Monday, March 25. Visit the online CFP for details.

Questions about the JCDL 2019 Doctoral Consortium can be directed to workshop organizers Dr. Peter Darch, Dr. Edie Rasmussen and Dr. Oksana Zavalina.

iConference 2019 starts Saturday, March 31 — that’s less than two weeks from now! Watch the conference home page from now through the end of the conference for important updates.

Here are a few of the latest developments:

• For those making presentations, the organizers have prepared track-specific instructions with details on such matters as duration of presentation and A/V technical capabilities. Click here to view.
• The Doctoral Colloquium webpage now provides full details on the colloquium agenda, mentors, and participant biographies.

Check the conference homepage regularly for more announcements as the conference approaches.

The Gathering for Open Ag Tech (GOAT) is an ad-hoc gathering of technologists and agriculturalists seeking to collaborate and create a vision for a fully open agricultural future. GOAT has scheduled a gathering April 4 and 5, 2019, immediately following iConference 2019, and invites informatics researchers, research data scientists and members of the public to take part.

The gathering, called GOAT:Hack, will take place at the USDA’s Beltsville Agricultural Research Center in Washington D.C.; application deadline March 22.

Click here for more information and application instructions.

Note: This event is not affiliated with the iConference or iSchools.

In response to industry trends and demand, the School of Information Systems at Singapore Management University (SMU) has strengthened its undergraduate curriculum with the introduction of two new degree programs – Bachelor of Science (Computer Science) from the new academic year commencing in August 2019, and Bachelor of Science (Computing & Law) in August 2020.

Some of the job roles which students in this program can undertake include: IT & business innovation; operating IT & business innovations within a legal framework; employing IT in legal practice; IT audit and compliance; risk management; legal knowledge engineer; legal technologist.

Click here for full story on the SMU website.