Submissions are no longer being accepted

Contributors will be notified of acceptances by December 23. Final PDF submissions of accepted papers are due by noon (U.S. CENTRAL TIME) Wednesday, Jan. 6. Please follow the ACM style guide, and save it as a PDF. The accepted papers will be shared among conference participants and archived in iDeals, the University of Illinois digital repository. IT IS UP TO THE AUTHOR to ensure that the information is correct. Please do not include any copyright information with your submission.

Call for Participation

The Call for Participation pdf

The Fifth Annual iConference 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 effect 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. Contributions are also solicited that reflect more broadly on complex interrelationships among people, information and technology in the iSociety, particularly those focusing on public and private sector settings. 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 and diverse research communities drawing on the interest and expertise of people across disciplinary and organizational boundaries. 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):

  • 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;
  • Critical reflection on the impacts of the iSchool movement (research, teaching, profession, industry and service) within and outside of our community.

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 Types

Papers

Original research papers [2500-4000 words] addressing the above will be refereed in a double-blind process. Please remove all identifying author information. The conference tool will ask for a separate submission that identifies the authors, the title of the paper and theme(s) the paper addresses. Papers will be published in the iConference online proceedings.

Posters

Posters presenting new work, preliminary results and design or educational projects are invited, especially from students (and faculty too!). Abstracts [800-1500 words] will be refereed in a double-blind process so please remove all identifying author information except the poster title. The conference tool will ask for a separate submission that identifies the authors, the title of the poster and theme(s) the poster addresses. Poster abstracts will be published in the iConference online proceedings.

Roundtable Discussions

Roundtables enable discussion of such topics as theory, methods, curricula, programmatic requirements, mentoring, etc., and will be open to all interested conference participants. Abstracts [800-1000 words] should state the theme of the discussion, rationale, questions that will guide/facilitate the discussion, the names and affiliations of roundtable leaders, and any plans for follow-up after the event. Proposers are encouraged to include diverse perspectives on the topic of interest. Roundtable discussion abstracts will be published in the iConference online proceedings.

Wildcard Sessions

This is the opportunity to step "out of the box" and propose a very different type of session: debate, research critique, fishbowl, etc. Description of the goals, topic, format/questions, participants, organizer(s) and any means of follow-up are to be provided in an abstract [800-1500 words]. All named participants should have already agreed to participate. Wildcard abstracts will be published in the iConference online proceedings.

Instructions for Authors

Formatting

Please use the official ACM Proceedings Format, available at www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates, for all submissions.

Timelines and Deadlines

  • 11/18/09: Contributed papers, abstracts of posters, roundtable discussions and wildcards will be due.
  • 12/21/09: Decisions will be made and authors can access reviews.
  • 1/6/2010: Final versions of all contributions due.

Submissions

All submissions should be made at www.ischools.org/conftool/. The conference tool will accept them beginning September 25, 2009.

If you had a login in the iConference system last year, please use the same login. If you have forgotten your password, the system can send it to you as long as your email address has not changed since last year. If you have changed e-mail addresses, please contact iconference@ischools.org for assistance.

Review Criteria

Especially welcome are submissions that exhibit any of the following characteristics:

  • Addresses the theoretical, methodological, epistemological and/or topical dimensions appropriate to an iSchool;
  • Addresses educational and/or pedagogical themes appropriate to an iSchool;
  • Addresses ways in which scholarly work and educational activities can connect to constituencies beyond the iSchool community;
  • Exemplifies multi- (or inter- or cross-) disciplinarity; and
  • Develops intellectual geographies in which attendees can learn about intellectual domains not their own but part of the multi-disciplinary iSchool space.

In addition to relevance to the conference focus and themes, submissions will be judged on such criteria as quality of content, significance for theory, education or engagement, originality and level of innovativeness, and quality of presentation.