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A highlight of the 2012 ASIS&T Annual Meeting, the pre-conference session on the History of ASIS&T and Information Science and Technology Worldwide drew presenters and attendees from around the globe. The day featured papers on four historical themes, starting with the institutional roots of ASIS&T and recognizing decades of research presented in the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology. The evolution of the field was apparent through a review of information revolutions prompted by the printing press, the post-World War II information crisis and the Internet, as well as through presentations on digital curation,ongoing work on relevance, sense-making theory and developments from Croatia to France.Discussion of the historical contexts of technology innovations and impacts consideredphotographic documentary techniques, binary computing and networking standards. The development of foundational ideas was explored through presentations on pioneering document indexing methods, the semantic challenge of term-oriented retrieval, early European perceptions of classification systems and the French view of communication and information science. Efforts to deepen the historical understanding of information science and technology will continue through oral history interviews, funded research and awards for outstanding papers [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article describes the aims and objectives of the Text REtrieval Conference (TREC) workshops and its impact in the areas of retrieval system effectiveness, retrieval system evaluation, and support of new retrieval tasks. The first TREC workshop was held in November 1992, and there has been a workshop held annually since then. The cumulative effort represented by the TREC is significant. Approximately 250 distinct groups representing more than 20 different countries have participated in at least one TREC, thousands of individual retrieval experiments have been performed and hundreds of papers have been published in the TREC proceedings. The TREC's impact on information retrieval research has been equally significant. A variety of large test collections have been built for both traditional ad hoc retrieval and new tasks such as cross-language retrieval, speech retrieval and question answering. The TREC has standardized the evaluation methodology used to assess the quality of retrieval results and, through the large repository of retrieval runs, demonstrated both the validity and efficacy of the methodology.

The article describes the type of paper submissions that will be accepted by the program committee of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. There are four types of paper submissions: 1) contributed papers; 2) contributed posters and short papers; 3) symposia and panels; and, 4) pre-conference sessions. For instance, contributed papers present original, recent research and design projects, and theoretical developments or innovative practical applications providing more general insight into an area of practice.

This article presents abstracts of research papers related to information science. A study titled "Role-Related Library Use by Local Union Officials," by M.A. Chaplan and E.J. Hertenstem, presents information on a group of library users that have not been studied in decades and relates their library use to their union roles. The study collected specific information about library use, both in order to understand their information-seeking behavior and also in order to learn how to improve library service to this group. It also proposes a possible model for union officials' information-seeking behavior with directions for further research to determine the applicability of the model. Another study "Web Citation Data for Impact Assessment: A Comparison of Four Science Disciplines," by L. Vaughan and D. Shaw, sampled 5,972 articles published in 114 journals covering four science disciplines. The researchers searched for Web citations to these articles and found that the numbers of citations correlated.

This article presents news briefs related to the American Society for Information Science and Technology's members and chapters. Special Interest Group (SIG)/International Information Issues raised over $7000 in just two months this spring for the 6th International Paper Contest on International Digital Libraries and Information Science and Technology Advances in Developing Countries. With fundraising a continuing process, SIG officials expressed pleasure and expectation for ongoing support from the information community. For its June 2005 meeting, the Los Angeles Chapter of the American Society for Information Science and Technology combined a professional development workshop on Personal Knowledge Management: Coping with Information Overload with a business meeting. Karen Fisher, Joan Durrance and Marian Bouch Hinton are the winners of ALA's 2005 Jesse H. Shera Award for Distinguished Published Research, for their article "Information Grounds and the Use of Need-based Services by Immigrants in Queens, NY: A Context-based, Outcome Evaluation Approach."