[Asist-announce] Letter re: closing Dusseldorf School of IS; JASIST TOC

[Richard Hill]

Letter from the ASIS&T Board re: the vote to close the Department of
Information Science of the Philosophical Faculty of the University of
Düsseldorf.

Esteemed Colleagues, Prof. Dr. Ulrich Rosar, and Prof. Dr. Anja Steinbeck:

We write to you on behalf of the board of the Association for Information
Science & Technology (ASIS&T). As the leading organization dedicated to
advancing information professionals and the field of information science,
ASIS&T is concerned about the sudden closing of the Department of
Information Science of the Philosophical Faculty of the University of
Düsseldorf. 

For over 75 years, ASIS&T members—thousands of researchers, developers,
practitioners, students, and professors in the field of information science
and technology from 50 countries around the world—have been leading the
search for new and better theories, techniques, and technologies to improve
access to information. Our members share a common interest in improving the
ways society stores, retrieves, analyzes, manages, archives and disseminates
information.

As such, we deem it essential that Information Science programs and
departments be adequately supported to continue to educate information
professionals, to encourage research, development and applications that
advance the field of information science; as well as to increase public
awareness of the field's benefits to society. Information is indeed a vital
resource for a functioning democracy. The closure of any Information Science
department would mean the discontinuation of the provision of
highly-qualified professionals trained to tackle emerging issues in our
networked societies and economies. The Department of information Science of
the Philosophical Faculty of the University of Düsseldorf, with its four
degree programs, is a vital player in the European Information Science
scene, altogether training close to 1,000 students, and producing vibrant
and quality research. 

We urge the leadership at the Philosophical Faculty and at the University of
Düsseldorf to find an alternative solution to the imminent closure of the
Department of Information Science.

Respectfully,

The ASIS&T Board: 
Dr. Nadia Caidi (President), Dr. Lynn Sillipigni Connaway (President-Elect),
Dr. Sandy Hirsh (Past President), Dr. Vicki L. Gregory, Dr. Chirag Shah, Dr.
Lynn Westbrook, Dr. Kristene Unsworth, Dr. June Abbas, Dr. Jamshid Beheshti,
Dr. Lauren Harrison, Dr. Fidelia Ibekwe-SanJuan, Dr. Kathryn La Barre, Dr.
Abebe Rorissa, Mr. Steve Hardin.

______

Journal of the Association for Information Science and Technology
© ASIS&T 
 
Volume 67, Issue 2 Pages C1 - C1, 245 - 490, February 2016

EDITORIAL
Onward (pages 247–248) 

RESEARCH ARTICLES

Perceptions of presidential candidates' personalities in twitter (pages
249–267) Sanmitra Bhattacharya, Chao Yang, Padmini Srinivasan and Bob
Boynton 

Rockin' robins: Do congresswomen rule the roost in the Twittersphere? (pages
268–275) Heather K. Evans, Joycelyn Ovalle and Stephen Green 

Identifying the role of individual user messages in an online discussion and
its use in thread retrieval (pages 276–288) Sumit Bhatia, Prakhar Biyani and
Prasenjit Mitra 

Question types and intermediary elicitations (pages 289–304) 
David Bodoff and Daphne Raban 

User modeling in a social network for cognitively disabled people (pages
305–317) Olatz Arbelaitz, José María Martínez-Otzeta and Javier Muguerza 

Physicians' learning at work through everyday access to information (pages
318–332) Esther Ebole Isah and Katriina Byström 

Comparison of drug information on consumer drug review sites versus
authoritative health information websites (pages 333–349) Shu Wen Chew and
Christopher S.G. Khoo 

Content-based image retrieval methods and professional image users (pages
350–365) Joan E. Beaudoin 

Generic speech summarization of transcribed lecture videos: Using tags and
their semantic relations (pages 366–379) Hyun Hee Kim and Yong Ho Kim 

litewi: A combined term extraction and entity linking method for eliciting
educational ontologies from textbooks (pages 380–399) Angel Conde, Mikel
Larrañaga, Ana Arruarte, Jon A. Elorriaga and Dan Roth 

An improved algorithm for unsupervised decomposition of a multi-author
document (pages 400–411) Chris Giannella 

On full text download and citation distributions in scientific-scholarly
journals (pages 412–431) Henk F. Moed and Gali Halevi 

Sleeping beauties in genius work: When were they awakened? (pages 432–440)
Jiang Li and Dongbo Shi 

The evolution of stakeholders' perceptions of disaster: A model of
information flow (pages 441–453) Jiuchang Wei, Fei Wang and Michael K.
Lindell 

The three dimensions of website navigability: Explication and effects (pages
454–464) Bartosz W. Wojdynski and Sriram Kalyanaraman 

A new approach for main path analysis: Decay in knowledge diffusion (pages
465–476) John S. Liu and Chung-Huei Kuan 

BRIEF COMMUNICATIONS
URL decay at year 20: A research note (pages 477–479) Fatih Oguz and Wallace
Koehler 

ARWU ranking uncertainty and sensitivity: What if the award factor was
Excluded? (pages 480–482) Milan Dobrota and Marina Dobrota 

Using targeted design interventions to encourage extra-role crowdsourcing
behavior (pages 483–489) Oded Nov, Jeffrey Laut and Maurizio Porfiri 

LETTERS TO THE EDITOR
Mental models may fail when faced with self-referential descriptors (page
490) Alexandre de Castro 



Richard B. Hill
Executive Director
ASIS&T
8555 16th Street, Suite 850
Silver Spring, MD  20910
v. (301) 495-0900
f. (301) 495-0810