Last week many members of the worldwide Information Science community gathered in Melbourne, Australia for the 82nd Annual Meeting of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIST). I was sorry not to be there myself. This was due to my teaching commitments this semester, in particular my final year undergraduate Knowledge Management module.

Dr Abebe Rorissa presents Dr Brian Detlor with Hazel’s ‘Outstanding Information Science Teacher’ award (Photo credit: Becky Willson)

Despite my lack of physical presence at the conference, I kept an eye on the hash-tagged tweets from the event (#asist2019; #asist19). I was particularly interested in the Twitter stream around breakfast time (in the UK) on Tuesday 22nd October when the delegates in Melbourne were sitting down for the conference dinner and awards ceremony. This was because Visiting Professor to the Centre for Social Informatics Dr Brian Detlor had kindly agreed to step up to the stage to accept the 2019 Clarivate Analytics Outstanding Information Science Teacher Award on my behalf.

The award was presented by Abebe Rorissa of the University of Albany – thank you! I should also thank Rebekah (Becky) Willson of McGill University for taking photographs during the presentation. Congratulations to Becky too: she is this year’s winner of the James M Cretsos Award for Leadership.

Also during the conference a decision was taken to set up a Strategic Planning Task Force for ASIST under the leadership of its incoming President for 2020. I am delighted to be appointed to this group, alongside the other members:

• Brian Detlor (Chair, McMaster University, Canada)
• Michael Olsson (University of Technology Sydney, Australia)
• Abebe Rorissa (University of Albany, US)
• Lynn Silipigni Connaway (OCLC Research, US)
• Rebekah (Becky) Willson (McGill University, Canada)