ASIS&T @ Pratt

Updates from ASIS&T @ Pratt

ASIST at Pratt — Mon, 21 Jan 2013 15:28:19 +0000

Thank you to everyone who came to our Spring Welcome Meeting on Wednesday. As always, there’s never enough time in the introductory meetings and we’re always being chased out of the conference room by the 6:30 class.

Here’s a summary for everyone, including all of you who couldn’t make it. If you want to be included on future emails, just let us know through the contact page.

Regards,

Andy Steinitz, Chair

Ngozi Okoro, Vice Chair

Elizabeth Willse, Social Media

World Information Architecture Day NYC

As those of you subscribed to the Listserv have seen, February 9 is World Information Architecture Day and the NYC event has asked Pratt ASIST to recruit student volunteers to help out. Information and schedule are available here: http://2013.worldiaday.org/locations/new-york

They’re also looking for some people to help with the sketch noting workshop on Friday night. Let me know if you want to help out with either/both. (Apparently registration is already full so this would be the only way that you can attend if you’re interested.)

Symposium

Houda is helping us set up our spring symposium and it’s looking like our topic is going to explore the realm of competitive intelligence: “an ethical process for obtaining information on the competitive environment for use in organizational decision making”. ASIS&T has a few resources on competitive intelligence but here’s a good rundown from the Bulletin if you want to take a look:

http://www.asis.org/Bulletin/Oct-10/OctNov10_Weiss_Naylor.html

And of course we need your help putting this together! Let us know if you want to participate so that we can include you in the planning meetings.

Other Events

We’re looking into possible tours and workshops for the semester. At the meeting, program-specific workshops still seem popular. Though so do digital preservation or human-computer interaction. Let us know if you have a preference or another idea for a half-day event.

We’re also looking into whether we can get a tour of a NYC UX office, hopefully at the illustrious Google, but we have a few other possible places that we’re going to reach out to as well. But again, let us know if you have a good idea for a tour. It doesn’t have to be a usability office.

FREE ProQuest Databases

Did you know that you can get free access to 40 ProQuest databases, including Library and Information Science Abstracts? Plus, you can get a free training session on how to use them with our program’s very own Brandi Copher. Brandi gave a quick rundown at our meeting but if you’d like to know more, we can send her your contact info.

Open Officer Position

We didn’t get to this at the meeting but the Treasurer position is now open since Tricia Bradshaw has graduated. The Treasurer is pretty important so please let us know if you’re interested. Basically, the treasurer will fill out and submit the annual budget request to Student Life by mid-May and work with Alex Ullman in their office to distribute/reimburse the funds. It takes attention but it’s not time consuming. Both Tricia and I did it in the past, and neither of us will be able to submit next year’s request so… if you appreciate the events we provide, why not give a little love back!

Getting Involved in ASIST

There are always ways that you can get involved in ASIST Pratt. And if your afraid that you can’t commit enough time, rest assured that we all have full schedules and just help out however we can. Working on one task for a couple hours on a weekend or spending a couple minutes every few weeks can make an immense difference. If you’d like to help with event planning, updating the website, contributing to our online presence… or if you’ve simply found an interesting info sci topic that none of your friends can comprehend and you want to discuss it, let us know!

ASIS&T Events

At the meeting, I was asked about a regional ASIST conference. Sadly, there is not one in the works. You can find upcoming ASIS&T events, including both the Information Architecture and RDAP summits, on their website: http://www.asis.org/conferences.html

Tonight, 6pm! – ASIST PRATT Welcome Meeting 2013

ASIST at Pratt — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 20:46:32 +0000

The ASIST Pratt Spring 2013 Welcome Meeting is tonight in the SILS conference room (610).
We’ll be discussing:
-Possible events like a workshop, tour, or a social
-World Information Architecture Day (Feb. 9)
-Our spring symposium, where it looks like we’ll be digging into the tactical world of competitive intelligence
-Also, Brandi Copher from Proquest will also be on hand to speak briefly

All this in about 20 minutes!

Drupal Workshop Nov. 17

ASIST at Pratt — Mon, 05 Nov 2012 16:23:39 +0000

We at AsistPratt are thrilled to announce that we will be offering a workshop on Drupal Saturday the 17th with Kevin Reiss from Princeton University! The workshop will take place from 1-4 (room tbd). This a great opportunity to learn about Drupal is about and get some experience in it.

If you would like to sign up please contact us at asist at pratt dot edu, space is limited and we are expecting this to be a popular workshop. Below you will find some more information on Drupal.

What is Drupal

Drupal is open source software maintained and developed by a community of 630,000+ users and developers. It’s distributed under the terms of the GNU General Public License (or “GPL”), which means anyone is free to download it and share it with others. This open development model means that people are constantly working to make sure Drupal is a cutting-edge platform that supports the latest technologies that the Web has to offer. The Drupal project’s principles encourage modularity, standards, collaboration, ease-of-use, and more. (http://drupal.org/about)

Rock You Like A Hurricane:Asist 2012 Annual Meeting

ASIST at Pratt — Thu, 01 Nov 2012 19:07:40 +0000

Greetings all!

We were called crazy, naive, and irresponsible for traveling right before a hurricane but we still made the trek from NYC to Baltimore for the 2012 ASIS&T annual meeting. The conference was held from October 28th-30th at the Hilton located in the beautiful Baltimore inner harbor. Unfortunately most of us were not able to do much sight-seeing (except when I got lost for ten minutes).

The student design competition was a great way to get fellow student attendees working together and networking. Two students from SILS won, Andy Steinitz and Matt Miller (who also presented his work in Linked Jazz at the poster reception), and will be attending next year’s meeting in Montreal with free registration!

Dr. Edward Chang, head of HTC research, gave a great keynote on making your smart phone smarter. There were also great panels on the future of the information professional, youth’s information literacy, and semantic metadata. There were also some great student presentations including a paper from April Earle from St. John’s University on creating an application profile for an oral history collection and another paper from Jaime Synder from Syracuse University on the creation of visual information.

Pratt SILS was definitely well represented at ASIS&T 2012. As mentioned we had two students win the design competition and one present on the Linked Jazz project. Dr. Lopatovska moderated a panel on l-schools (library schools) and i-schools (information science schools). Dr. Choi also presented on her research at the poster reception. I also found myself talking to a student who quoted Dr. Rabina’s work on German Traces in a paper.

As this was my first conference I do not have any comparison to make to this. I can say that this was an incredibly informative and enjoyable experience. I am definitely looking forward to ASIS&T 2013!

Tricia Bradshaw
Vice-Chair Fall’12

First ASIS&T Meeting of the Semester

ASIST at Pratt — Thu, 06 Sep 2012 16:44:12 +0000

If you’re new to Pratt SILS, welcome! (And of course, if this isn’t your first semester, welcome back!) ASIS&T will be holding our first public meeting of the semester

Wednesday September 12th, 5:50-6:30 PM

Pratt Manhattan Campus, Room 608

Come meet the ASIS&T officers, and let’s talk about our plans for the semester and the year.

Help us plan for the semester by telling us what kinds of programs you would be interested in?
Let us know (survey link).

Linked Open Data Workshop

ASIST at Pratt — Sun, 19 Aug 2012 20:17:25 +0000

Thank you again to Chris Weller for his presentation on Linked Open Data back in April.
Slides from the Presentation (pdf)

We are planning to host more workshops again this year. Get in touch if there’s a topic you’d like to learn about.

Linked Open Data Workshop This Saturday (4/14)

ASIST at Pratt — Sun, 08 Apr 2012 17:43:09 +0000

ASIST @ Pratt will have a workshop on Linked Open Data on Saturday afternoon, April 14. It will provide an overview of Linked Data, the Semantic Web, and RDF–the “backbone” of Linked Data. We’ll review examples and get some hands on experience too! It’ll start at 1 and wrap up sometime before 4.

This workshop will be taught by Chris Weller: UX designer, programmer for the Linked Jazz project, and recent graduate of Pratt SILS. Attendees should be enrolled in or have completed LIS-653 Knowledge Organization and LIS-654 Information Technologies, or have a working knowledge of markup languages.

Please RSVP to asistpratt [at] gmail to reserve a seat since space is limited.

Where: Pratt Manhattan, Room 609
When: April 14, 1-4 pm

If you aren’t familiar with Linked Data, here’s a short video from Europeana (which is a great site if you have not used it yet):
http://lod-lam.net/summit/2012/02/20/linked-open-data-what-is-it-and-why-is-it-good-for-you/

Next Friday: Columbia Digital Centers Tour with ASIS&T Pratt

ASIST at Pratt — Fri, 23 Mar 2012 19:56:07 +0000

ASIS&T Pratt is going on a tour of the Columbia University Digital Centers. It will be on *Friday, March 30th at 3:00pm.* If you have the time, I think you’ll really enjoy seeing what the Digital Humanities Center, the Digital Social Science Center, and the Digital Science Center are doing to support their respective fields of digital scholarship.

If you have an interest in academic or research libraries, this will be a great opportunity to see libraries supporting the present and future of research in different disciplines. Even if you are not leaning towards academic libraries, the way that the digital centers use cutting-edge technology and physical space to support their patron’s interests will make for a very interesting and informative tour. The Columbia University Libraries are one of the premier research institutions in New York City and they hold the third-largest academic library collection in the nation.

The tour will begin in the Digital Humanities Center in Butler Library at 3pm.
ASIS&T Pratt officer Bethany Edwards is organizing the tour; you can meet her in the following locations:

Butler Library, by skinnylawyer, CC BY-SA 2.0

2:20-2:30 – Pratt Manhattan Campus, 6th floor. Bethany will be in the common area wearing a red hat.
2:55pm – Outside the main entrance of Butler Library (535 West 114th St., New York, NY 10027). Bethany will be near the doors, still wearing a red hat.

Directions to Columbia’s Butler Library:
Take the 1 train to 113th Street/Columbia University. If you are coming from downtown, Pratt, or Brooklyn, the 2 train is express (faster) from 14th street to 96th street, but at 96th street you must get off the 2 and take the 1 train to 113th street. Enter the campus through the iron gates and turn right when the sidewalks begin to split off in different directions. Butler is the large, central building with philosophers on the front of it.

If you are interested in the tour or have questions, please email Bethany at asistpratt [at] gmail [dot] com

Conference Scholarships on Information and Technology

ASIST at Pratt — Thu, 16 Feb 2012 19:57:55 +0000

Hello Everyone,

Thanks to Student Life we are able to offer scholarships totaling $1010 to help Pratt SILS students attend conferences on information science and technology. The scholarship can pay for lodging and registration (not travel or incidentals) at any conference related to the field. Submissions can be made individually or as a group. Preference will be given to ASIS&T @ Pratt members.

The disbursement can either be in the form of a college check or reimbursement for receipted expenses. Either way, the request needs to be submitted to Student Life by the end of the semester.

If you’re interested, here’s how to apply:

1. Send us a quick email at asistpratt@gmail.com to let us know that you’re interested. Let us know if there’s a specific conference that you’re considering.

2. Submit a short proposal explaining:
-What you feel you will get out of attending the conference and how you plan to participate
-Your planned expenditures

3. Cross your fingers

We will begin reviewing proposals starting February 24 and thereafter on a rolling basis.

Here’s a list of some conferences you can choose from, but feel free to apply for any other:

The Information Architecture Summit presented by ASIS&T and the IA Institute is on March 21–25 (Wed-Sun) in New Orleans ($570 registration per student)
At the same time is ASIS&T’s Research Data Access & Preservation Summit 2012, also in New Orleans ($310 registration per member)
Collective Intelligence 2012 is April 18–20 at MIT in Cambridge, MA ($345 registration per student)
Sentiment Analysis Tutorial & Symposium on May 7–8 in New York (the have a “special low rate for students”)
Wikimania is July 12–14 in Washington D.C. ($35-55 registration per student)

Good luck!

Topics for 2012

ASIST at Pratt — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 20:35:29 +0000

At our January meeting this past Thursday, we met a lot of new people and threw around a lot of great ideas. Thanks to everyone who came, you really brought some good energy to start the semester with!

Here are some things to keep in mind until the next meeting:

1. Spring Symposium – what should our topic be? Some suggestions:

Big Data
Data Preservation
Culturomics

2. Spring Symposium (b) – who can volunteer to help organize it? Time commitment is about two hours per week tops (mostly late March to May), and organizers get to call up and meet big names in the Information Science field!

3. Conferences! We have a total Conference Scholarship budget of $1010, which can send one person to a very expensive conference or two people to less expensive conferences. Consider the following:

There is an Information Architecture Summit March 21-25 (Wed-Sun) in New Orleans ($570 registration per student)
At the same time is ASIS&T’s Research Data Access & Preservation Summit 2012, also in New Orleans ($310 registration per member)
Collective Intelligence 2012 is April 18-20 at MIT in Cambridge, MA ($345 registration per student)
Wikimania is July 12–14 in Washington D.C. ($35-$60 registration per student)

Be thinking about what you want to learn this semester to supplement your Pratt classes…your wildest dreams of Information Science knowlege can come true! Leave comments, email us at asistpratt@gmail.com, or just bring your ideas to the next meeting! (TBA)