Leading the Field
Recent recognition for UW faculty, alumni and students

Karen E. Fisher promoted to full professor

Dr. Fisher joined the iSchool in 1999 after two years as a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Michigan's School of Information. As Lead Investigator of the IBEC (Information Behavior in Everyday Contexts) research program, Fisher focuses on social and cognitive aspects of how individuals need, seek, give and use information in different contexts, particularly in informal social settings. With support from the IMLS and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, Fisher is currently Co-Principal Investigator of the U.S. Impact project, which is employing mixed-methods to investigate the broad impacts of free access to computers and the Internet in public libraries across the country. From September 2004 to August 2008 she served as Program Chair for the MLIS program. Please join us in congratulating Dr. Fisher on this accomplishment.

Alumnus Reece Dano profiled in Information Outlook

Reece Dano, a 2007 alumnus of the Online MLIS program, is profiled in the new issue of Information Outlook, the flagship publication of the Special Libraries Association. In the article, Reece answers ten questions about how a chance encounter at an SLA student reception led to his “dream job” with a design consultancy. He serves Ziba Design as an information specialist and specifically as an independent, embedded research consultant within the firm.

You can find the entire article on the SLA Web site. Membership is required to read the article.

Three iSchool alumni named Movers & Shakers by Library Journal

Jill Bourne ('97), Brian Bannon ('99), and Carlene Engstrom ('90) have all been named "Movers & Shakers," Library Journal's annual list of emerging leaders in libraries.

Bourne and Bannon work together at the San Francisco Public Library, where Bourne is Deputy City Librarian and Bannon is Chief of Branches. Together, they are shepherding SFPL through its largest-ever facilities expansion (16 new branches, 18 renovated ones) and using the opportunity to make the library system more environmentally responsible. They're looking at sustainable design options for 14 branches and hoping to get LEED certification Silver or better in at least 10. This is part of a larger green effort by the city of San Francisco and SFPL, which also has recycling and composting in the branches and a solar-powered book mobile.

Carlene Engstrom does triple duty at D'Arcy McNickle Library in Pablo, Montana. Because of the many populations served by the library, she is an academic librarian (to the students at Salish Kootenai Tribal College), a tribal librarian (for the Confederated Salish and Kootenai Tribes), and a public librarian (to the residents of the Flathead Reservation). As of last June, she is also the first Native American to serve on the Federal Depository Library Council. Somehow, Engstrom has also found the time to digitize the local Char-Koosta News archive and migrate her library's holdings into the University of Montana Libraries online catalog.

The full list and profiles of the 2009 Movers & Shakers can be found on the Library Journal Web site.

Center for Information & Society well-received at international ICTD conference

The iSchool, along with its Center for Information & Society (CIS), had a very strong presence and was well-received at the recently concluded International Conference on Information and Communication Technologies and Development (ICTD2009). This year's conference was held in Doha, Qatar, April 17-19. This conference serves as the top research venue for new scholarship in the field of ICT and international development.

Bill Gates was this year's keynote speaker, and he mentioned CIS’s Global Impact Study project in his keynote address. Gates cited the project in his statements about the need for better metrics to understand the impact of information and communication technologies, to identify high performing projects and weed out less performing projects, and the need for a better-elaborated model of interdisciplinarity in ICT research.

Researchers from the iSchool were highly visible, presenting two papers, three posters, and moderating a panel (see www.cis.washington.edu/ictd2020). In addition, researchers from CIS presented a workshop and four product demonstrations. CIS's Joyojeet Pal and UW Engineering's Beth Kolko also served as technical program committee members for this conference.

A fuller description of iSchool and CIS activity at this conference is available on the CIS Web site and on the ICTD2009 conference Web site.

Jacob O. Wobbrock receives Best Paper nomination at CHI 2009

Assistant Professor Jacob O. Wobbrock received a Best Paper Nomination at CHI 2009 in Boston, Mass. Dr. Wobbrock was recognized for the article "User-defined gestures for surface computing," co-authored with Meredith Ringel Morris and Andrew D. Wilson from Microsoft Research.

CHI is the leading international conference for Human-Computer Interaction, a rapidly-growing field that studies and facilitates how people interact with computers. The conference is sponsored by the Special Interest Group on Computer Human Interaction (SIGCHI), an active community within the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).

Best Paper nominees represent the top 5 percent of more than 700 full papers submitted. Wobbrock has won three CHI Best Paper Awards in the last four years, having won two Best Paper Awards in 2008 and one at the CHI 2006 conference as well.

Karine Barzilai-Nahon to represent Israel on UN committee on science and technology

CIS Director Karine Barzilai-Nahon will represent Israel at the upcoming annual meeting of the UN Commission on Science and Technology for Development (CSTD). CSTD, which is a part of the UN’s Economic and Social Council (ECOSOC), provides the UN General Assembly and ECOSOC with high-level advice on science and technology issues. This 12th annual meeting of the CSTD will take place in Geneva on May 25th.

Representatives from 43 countries were elected to participate in this discussion. The main purpose is to examine the progress made to date in implementing recommendations from the UN’s World Summit on the Information Society (WSIS) which took place in 2003 and 2005. This year’s meeting will also address development policies for a socioeconomically-inclusive information society, as well as science, technology and engineering for innovation and capacity-building in education and research.

For more information, please visit the UN’s CSTD Web site.

Dean Bruce to chair UW Board of Deans, iSchool Caucus

UW iSchool Dean Harry Bruce has been elected chair of the University of Washington's Board of Deans and Chancellors. Dr. Bruce will assume this role beginning in fall quarter of 2009. The Board of Deans and Chancellors is comprised of the Deans of UW Schools, Colleges, and Libraries, the Chancellors of UW Tacoma and UW Bothell, is led by the Provost, and is charged with helping set direction and providing guidance for the entire University of Washington system, including campuses in Bothell and Tacoma. The Board also provides guidance in the areas of technology, research and student recruitment, among other areas.

Dean Bruce has also been elected to head the iCaucus Board of Deans, a group comprising 23 institutions of higher education in North America, Asia and Europe known collectively as "iSchools." The iCaucus works together to promote the growth and development of the international iSchools movement, primarily by building awareness of the member schools and their scholarship, research and instruction. The iSchools work together to explore organizational and social issues related to the way people create, store, find, manipulate and share information. Dean Bruce will begin his term as Chair of the iCaucus Board of Deans in February 2010 at the time of the next iConference.

Doctoral student Shaun Kane wins honorable mention in national competition

Shaun Kane received an Honorable Mention in the extremely competitive 2008-2009 NISH National Scholar Award for Workplace Innovation and Design. The NISH award is for work in assistive technologies ranging from simple mechanical devices to high-tech computer aids. Kane’s entry, along with co-authors Dr. Jacob O. Wobbrock of the iSchool and Jeffrey Bigham of the Computer Science and Engineering department at the UW, was on Slide Rule, a prototype demonstrating how to make touch screens accessible to blind users using multi-touch interaction techniques.

William Jones speaks at MIT

Research Professor William Jones gave a talk titled "Putting our digital information in its place: Lessons learned from fieldwork and prototyping in the Keeping Found Things Found project" at Massachusetts Institute of Technology on May 5. Dr. Jones’s talk was part of the Yahoo/MIT EECS HCI-IR Seminar Series, a monthly series of speakers on topics at the intersection of human-computer interaction and information retrieval. Under a multi-year grant from the National Science Foundation, researchers in the iSchool’s Keeping Found Things Found group are studying how people go about completing various projects that matter to them in their lives. Jones is the principal investigator on this project.