The Fifth Annual iConference, Feb. 3-6, 2010, at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, brings together scholars, professionals and students who come from diverse backgrounds and share interests in working at the nexus of people, information and technology. The 2010 iConference theme addresses iMPACTS. As the Obama administration brings new potential for our field to affect change, particularly through investments in education, broadband and scientific research, it also is providing a moment for critical reflection on the impacts of the iSchool movement (research, teaching, profession, industry and service) within and outside our community. In this theme, we thus consider such questions as: What are the broad impacts (actual and potential) of the iSchool movement? How can impact be defined, identified, measured and communicated to key audiences?
This Call for Participation solicits contributions that reflect on the core activities of the iSchool community, including research, design, methods and epistemologies, educational practices and engagement between the iSchools and wider constituencies both in the United States and abroad. With invited speakers, paper and poster sessions, roundtables, wildcard sessions, workshops and ample opportunities for conversations and connections, the iConference celebrates and engages our multidisciplinary efforts to understand the complex interrelationships among people, information and technology in the iSociety. Sessions will feature completed and early cutting-edge work. The iConference will also include a doctoral student workshop and a mentoring session for untenured faculty and post-doctoral researchers.
In addition to the conference theme, areas of interest include (but are not limited to):
* Critical reflection on the impacts of the iSchool movement (research, teaching, profession, industry and service) within and outside of our community;
* IT infrastructure development and sustainability in the home, organizations, communities, society;
* Diversity in the iSociety: inclusion of underrepresented groups--women, youth, the aging, people with disabilities, indigenous communities, racial and ethnic minorities, etc.;
* Information behavior: theoretical, empirical and methodological advances in everyday life settings, eScience and eResearch, information literacy, etc.;
* Information management: life cycle, personal information management, digital asset management, technologies of remembering and forgetting;
* Digital libraries: preserving digital information, information quality, security and privacy;
* Information organization: metadata, ontologies, the Semantic Web, social tagging; and/or
* eGovernment: information policy, economics, ethics, law, technologies of privacy and trust.
Research Track
The Associate Deans for Research of the iSchools are coordinating a special research track on "measuring research impact." The difficulty associated with measuring the impact of research efforts is not limited to information science. The key is to distinguish indicators/measures of outcomes and impacts from indicators/measures of inputs or resources expended. Papers submitted in this track could discuss:
* Conceptual and theoretical to empirical and data driven research impacts;
* Overview of the micro level (impact of individual researchers and contributions) to the meso (impact of individual communities or schools) to the macro (the impact of the iCaucus or the whole of information science research); and/or
* The philosophy of measurement to the practical issues of conveying the significance of information science research to non-scientists.
Example topics include:
* Measuring and comparing the methods and effectiveness of cross-, inter-, or trans-disciplinary research with research within a particular discipline;
* Bibliometric measures of impact;
* Indicators of scholarly impact; and
* Indicators of professional, social and policy impacts.
If you are submitting a paper to this track, please include "measuring research impact" in the paper title (to be removed in the proceedings).
Submission information and more at ischools.org.
