Dean Ronald L. Larsen

The School of Information Sciences was well-represented at The First Conference of the i-School Community: Bridging Disciplines to Confront Grand Challenges. This conference, held in September at the Pennsylvania State University, was designed to celebrate the i-School community, to explore and develop the essentials of the Information field, address challenges facing i-Schools, and to discuss the i-School identity.

This conference was hosted by a consortium of information schools (i-Schools), part of their long-term strategy to build brand identity and foster collaborative efforts among “i-Schools” across the country.  SIS, as one of the founding members of the consortium, encouraged faculty, staff and students to attend this seminal conference.

Many of the SIS faculty & staff prepared papers to present at the conference including:

Anthony Debons, Essentials for an Educational Program in Information Science and Technology

Peter Brusilovsky, From Information Retrieval to Information Access: A User-

Centered View and an Agenda for I-Schools

Toni Carbo, Information Ethics: A Fundamental Building Block of the Field of Information

Ellen Gay Detlefsen, Understanding the Anatomy of I-School and Medical School Cooperation: A concept paper for The First i-Conference of the i-School Community

Stephen Hirtle, I-dentity: Is it the i-forest or the i-trees?

Terrance R. Kizina, Grand Challenges Facing Enrollments

Dean Ronald L. Larsen, Centripetal or Centrifugal Forces at Play? Challenges in the Education of Information Professionals

Glenn L. Ray

Glenn L. Ray, Web Services in the i-School Curriculum

Ken Sochats, Who Are We?

Richard Thompson, Telecommunications as an I-School Discipline

In addition, Dean Larsen acted as a “Grand Rapporteur” for the conference, gathering insights and collating observations from the conference participants and attendees.

Students from SIS featured in the Graduate Student Poster Session:

Julian Aiken, “Framing a Digital Community: The Creation and Publication of Digital Watch”

Mary Jo Dorsey “Investigating Information Seeking Behaviors of Primary Care Physicians Who Take Care of Older Depressed Patients and their Family Caregivers”

Div Sharma, “Whirlpool: Efficient Querying Wireless Sensor Networks for Non-Intrusive Structural Monitoring”

Also attending:

Roger Flynn, Daqing He, and Martin Weiss.