ASIS&T Annual Meeting Student Volunteer Opportunity

ASIS&T provides an opportunity to help students who might not otherwise be able to participate in the upcoming Annual Meeting as a Student Volunteer. Students who participate get complimentary registration in exchange for about 4 hours of work a day.

The deadline for this opportunity is July 20, 2009. The dates of the Annual Meeting are from November 8th to the 11th in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

I have participated as a student volunteer for ASIS&T three times now and I recommend it to anybody who is interested in attending the conference.

If you would like more information on this opportunity please email me and I will forward you the information. You have to be a member of ASIS&T to participate.

Information Architecture Summit '09 Recap at Wayne State

What: Information Architecture Summit, Detroit Recap
Where: Kresge Library Auditorium, Wayne State University
When: Thursday, March 26, 11:00 am

The 10th Information Architecture Summit will be March 20-22 in Memphis, The IA Summit is the premier event for the IA community and represents the state of the art of the field. Hear from people who attended this session to get an overview of what happened at the conference and what you need to know as an information architect in today's rapidly changing world. Check out the conference program at iasummit.org and come prepared to ask questions about what intrigues you. Panelists will talk about their favorite (or least favorite) sessions from others and may talk a little about what they presented at the conference.

Panelists

Peter Morville is President of Semantic Studios and co-author of the Polar Bear book. He is presenting a pre-conference session on IA 3.0 at the Summit.

Keith Instone is the Information architecture lead for ibm.com. He is helping to organize the Content Strategy consortium at the Summit.

Chris Farnum is a Senior Information Architect at Enlighten. He is giving a talk on remote user research at the Summit.

Heidi Blanton is an Information Science student at Wayne State University and President of the ASIS&T student chapter. She is attending the summit as a student volunteer.

The panel session will be recorded and streamed live for virtual participants via UStream. If you are interested in attending please RSVP.

There will be a meet and greet after the panel on the 3rd Floor of the Kresge Library, refreshments will be served.

Parking is available at several garages on the WSU campus. For visitors, parking is $3.50 at the gate, quarters or dollar bills only.

Web Standards and Accessibility Presentation

We want to thank Nick DeNardis for his wonderful presentation on web standards and accessibility today. Nick gave us an overview of the topics and presented us with a great list of resources at the end of the presentation, which I will post here as well.

First though I want to post the video of today’s presentation. This is the first time that ASIS&T used UStream to stream a presentation live. We still have some things to learn, but it was great to see people participating and viewing online as the presentation was taking place. The room was really too large for our purposes, and the video and audio quality were about as good as my web cam would allow (oh and Nick has a much louder speaking voice than I do, I'm apparently afraid of microphones!) But one really great thing about ASIS&T is we get the opportunity to play with new tools and services all the time, and it was certainly great to include virtual participants in a live event.

Nick’s slides are difficult to read in the video, but you can follow along with the slides included here.

Nick DeNardis Presentation Slides

We got a wonderful list of resources that seem too good not to share with everybody.

Opera Web Standards Curriculum

The W3C Markup Validation Service

Section 508: The Road to Accessibility

jQuery: The Write Less, Do More JavaScript Library

My DebugBar | IETester

Cynthia Says – Accessibility Tester

A bonus link from Nick later in the day:

Web Development Tools – What’s in your web toolbelt?

And a bonus link from Deborah who participated in our UStream chat room:

Understanding Web Accessibility Obstacles

We would like to thank Nick for this very educational presentation, and those who took time out of their schedules to join us in person or online. As Wayne State students it’s great to see these techniques put into place on many of the websites we use every day.

Nick DeNardis: Web Standards and Accessibility

A presentation by Nick DeNardis, Associate Director of Web Communications at Wayne State University, on standards and accessibility in web design.

When: Tuesday, March 3, 2009 at 10:30 am
Where: Kresge Library Auditorium, Wayne State University, Detroit, MI

Nick has a background in computer science, and has always been interested in user experience and accessibility. Part of his work at Wayne State includes reviewing and benchmarking other university web sites. His personal web philosophy is to keep things light, simple and agile, always striving for simple solutions to complex problems.

Nick is the host of the video blog, EDU Checkup, he reviews higher education websites from the point of view of a first time visitor, while critiquing the design, information architecture and code of the sites. He is a staff writer at .eduGuru, a higher education marketing and web development blog. He takes an active role in the higher education web community by sharing his thoughts and real world analysis in the Wayne State Web Communications Blog. He is also an officer for Refresh Detroit, a group of web professionals whose goal is to promote web standards, usability, and accessibility and to spread the knowledge of web design in the Detroit and Ann Arbor Michigan areas.

To accomodate our off campus classmates, we will be hosting a live version of this presentation via UStream and will have a recording available after the event.

If you would like to join us or view online please RSVP!

Current Officers

President: Heidi Blanton-Hansen

Vice President: Vacant

Secretary: Brianna Reilly

Treasurer: Emily Gibson

Faculty Advisor: Dr. Bin Li

About Us

Since 1937, the American Society for Information Science and Technology has been the society for information professionals leading the search for new and better theories, techniques, and technologies to improve access to information.

ASIS&T brings together diverse streams of knowledge, focusing what might be disparate approaches into novel solutions to common problems. ASIS&T bridges the gaps not only between disciplines but also between the research that drives and the practices that sustain new developments.

ASIS&T counts among its membership some 4,000 information specialists from such fields as computer science, linguistics, management, librarianship, engineering, law, medicine, chemistry, and education; individuals who share a common interest in improving the ways society stores, retrieves, analyzes, manages, archives and disseminates information, coming together for mutual benefit.

Techniques and technologies emerge daily in the fields of library and information science, communications, networking and computer science. Yet information professionals in one discipline often are isolated from the key developments in others. What an irony that a field advocating the development, sharing and use of information is itself isolated.

Only ASIS&T Bridges The Gap Between All Information Professionals...