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Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA By:  Pete DiPrimio Mar 24, 2025 The Luddy School successfully hosted the mid-March prestigious iConference 2025, one of the world’s top global conferences for informational professionals. ILS Chair Noriko Hara’s long-time vision paid off in a big way, drawing more than 250 professors, students and information professionals. Some traveled more than 8,000 miles to attend. Noriko Hara dared big and won. The Information and Library Science chair and professor of Information Science aimed to host one of the world’s top global conferences for informational professionals and that vision became last week’s iConference 2025 “Living in an AI-gorithmic World ” at the Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering. Howard Rosenbaum , director of Graduate Programs for Information and Library Science, and professor of Information Science, shared Hara’s vision and worked to enable the Luddy School to host the 20th anniversary of this internationally renowned conference. Luddy School Dean Joanna Millunchick ’s support ensured the Luddy School would host for the first time, showcasing the school’s impressive academic opportunities (including an ILS program ranked No. 9 nationally) and facilities, including the Luddy Artificial Intelligence Center.  Millunchick opened the conference by welcoming attendees to Indiana University and Bloomington. “Where else could the 20th anniversary of the iConference be but Luddy, said Rosenbaum, who served as a co-conference chair along with Hara, Devan R Donaldson , associate professor of Information Science and MLS program director, and Carol Choksy , senior lecturer of Information Science. “We’re at the cutting edge of so much information research. It really made sense for us to host.”

The iFederation is deeply concerned about the recent executive order issued by the Trump administration in the US, which calls for the elimination of the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). This decision poses a significant threat to the global community of information professionals, researchers, and the public who rely on the vital services provided by IMLS. IMLS has been a cornerstone in supporting libraries and museums in all communities large and small across the United States, fostering innovation, education, and cultural preservation. Every person in the U.S. will be impacted as their public libraries and state associations lose important funding support. Furthermore, IMLS has been instrumental in providing funding support for Native Hawaiian and Tribal Libraries, which now face an existential threat by this loss of support. The impact of this decision is not confined to the United States. The agency's contributions extend far beyond national borders, influencing global best practices and providing a model for similar institutions worldwide. Libraries and museums worldwide look to IMLS for guidance and collaboration. The agency's research and policy development efforts have set standards that are emulated globally, promoting the free flow of information and cultural exchange. The iFederation urges the Trump administration to reconsider this profound decision and support the invaluable role that IMLS plays in fostering a well-informed, educated, and culturally rich society. We call on policymakers, stakeholders, and the global community to advocate for the preservation of IMLS and its mission. We encourage all individuals who value libraries and museums to voice their support and join us in this critical effort to safeguard the future of these essential institutions. The iFederation is a partnership of the Association for Information Science and Technology ( ASIS&T ), the Association for Library and Information Science Education ( ALISE ), and the iSchools Organization .

School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley Application Deadline:   04 April 2025. The School of Information at the University of California, Berkeley invites applications for up to four new full-time Bellwether Postdoctoral Scholars to start as soon as July 2025. The exact start date is negotiable. These positions are available for two years, and are non-renewable. This position is not eligible for H-1B sponsorship, but is eligible to apply for a J-1 visa. These postdoctoral positions are for academics in the early stages of their career who demonstrate exceptional potential as a scholar and researcher. Applicants should either have completed a doctoral degree, or be able to convincingly demonstrate that they will complete the degree before they intend to start this postdoctoral position (e.g. by documenting a scheduled viva/final defense).

Universitat Oberta de Catalunya Affiliated teaching staff- WEB PROGRAMMING Application Deadline:   10 April 2025 We are looking for course instructors for web programming subjects in the Computer Science, Multimedia and Telecommunications Studies. The collaboration with the UOC will be based on the provision of professional services. Please refer to the following link for information regarding job functions and conditions: Functions and conditions for teaching collaboration at UOC Interested candidates should visit the Join our team section of the website, where you can find the terms and conditions. SOFTWARE ENGINEERING- Affiliated Teaching Staff Application Deadline:   10 April 2025 We are looking for course instructors for the subjects of the Software Engineering area of the Computer Engineering degree: - Software Engineering: introduction to software engineering, object orientation, requirements and UML analysis. - Requirements Engineering: introduction to requirements engineering, requirements elicitation, requirements management, requirements documentation, requirements verification and validation. - Analysis and Design with Patterns: principles of software design, analysis patterns, architecture patterns, responsibility assignment patterns and design patterns. The collaboration with the UOC will be based on the provision of professional services. Interested candidates should visit the Join our team section of the website, where you can find the terms and conditions. HUMAN COMPUTER INTERACTION - Affiliated teaching staff Application Deadline:   10 April 2025 We are looking for course instructors for the subject Human-Computer Interaction in the Bachelor’s in Computer Engineering at UOC. This course explores the fundamentals of Interaction Design and User Interfaces (UI) through the lens of Universal Design. Based on the definition by Ronald L. Mace, Universal Design focuses on creating products and environments that are accessible to all people, without the need for adaptations or specialized designs. The course emphasizes the importance of designing inclusive digital systems, integrating principles of usability, accessibility, and user experience (UX) to ensure that any individual, regardless of age, abilities, or condition, can use digital products effectively and intuitively. Students will work with User-Centered Design (UCD) methodologies and apply the seven principles of Universal Design through projects involving user research, prototyping, and evaluation of interactive systems. The collaboration with the UOC will be based on the provision of professional services. Interested candidates should visit the Join our team section of the website, where you can find the terms and conditions. ALGEBRA - Affiliated teaching staff Application Deadline:   10 April 2025 Consultant (collaborating teacher) to develop the teaching of the subject algebra in the degree of computer engineering. It requires a degree in mathematics, engineering or physics and teaching experience in similar subjects in the university environment. Experiences of educational innovation will be valued. The collaboration with the UOC will be based on the provision of professional services. Interested candidates should visit the Join our team section of the website, where you can find the terms and conditions.

Indiana University Indianapolis Application Deadline:   Open until filled. The IU Luddy School of Informatics, Computing, and Engineering at Indiana University Indianapolis invites applications for an open-rank (assistant, associate, or full professor) clinical faculty position in the Department of Library and Information Science. The appointment will begin August 1, 2025. This is a non-tenure track, 10-month appointment, with the opportunity for annual reappointment and additional summer compensation. The primary duties of clinical appointees at IU are teaching and service. Position Summary: Exceptional candidates in the fields of data studies or library and information science are being sought to join our department. Candidates will be considered from all related areas, including communications and social informatics. We seek a dynamic individual who will combine excellence in teaching with an external service component focused on building impactful campus and community initiatives and partnerships for the department’s academic programs. The ideal candidate will foster partnerships that create internship opportunities and facilitate experiential learning for students, equipping them with the skills and practical experience needed to excel in their careers.

National Taiwan University Application Deadline: 10 July 2025 The Department of Library and Information Science at the National Taiwan University is seeking to employ two full-time faculty members. Candidates should have a Doctoral degree in library and information science, information management, information and communication, educational technology or related fields. Those who can teach required courses in LIS in Mandarin Chinese and English are preferred. The Appointment begins on February 1, 2026 or August 1, 2026. Official ranks will be appointed according to working experience and qualifications.

University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign Application Deadline: 14 April 2025 The School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign invites applications from qualified individuals for a 100% full-time Non-Tenure Track, Open Rank, Specialized Faculty in Information Sciences or Data Science. Applications are invited from qualified individuals for a 100% full-time non-tenure track, open rank, specialized faculty position the School of Information Sciences. Specialized faculty are expected to teach at the graduate and undergraduate levels and engage in research and service activities that enhance the mission of the school. We welcome candidates who can demonstrate the broader impact of their work in areas such as public health, agriculture, social media, misinformation, economics, history of science, finance, science of science, manufacturing, retail, transportation, education, and library sciences. Immediate teaching need is at the intersection of technology and the social impact of Data Science and includes (but is not limited to): Data management, Ethical data science, Data governance, Data storytelling and data visualization. The iSchool takes a human-centered approach to data science that considers the socio-technical context in which data is collected, and the impact of computational models in those settings. In addition to organized instruction, specialized faculty engage with students through discovery and experiential learning to develop their research and/or meet career aspirations.

The organizers of iConference 2025 are pleased to announce the finalists for this year’s Best Paper and Poster Awards. Five finalists in each category have been selected representing the most outstanding of the many submissions received. This year’s finalists demonstrate breadth of quality information research being conducted at iSchools and other institutions worldwide. The work of these finalists will be presented along with all other accepted submissions at iConference 2025 our 20th iConference in the annual series taking place hybrid: online with the Virtual Academic Program (11-14 March 2025) and onsite with Academic Program in Bloomington, Indiana, USA (18-22 March 2025). The iConference 2025 is hosted by hosted by the Indiana University Bloomington . The Award winners will be announced at the virtual iConference 2025 Keynote 11 March 2025 and celebrated at the Opening Reception onsite in Bloomington 18 March 2025. Best Full Research Paper Award Finalists (1.000 USD) ID 113 Improving Scholarship Accessibility with Reinforcement Learning  by Wang, Haining; Clark, Jason; McKelvey, Hannah; Sterman, Leila; Zheng, Gao; Tian, Zuoyu; Liu, Xiaozhong ID 145  Leveraging Social Circles and Algorithmic Processes in Digital Mental Health Tools for College Students' Stress Management  by Kazi, Farhanuddin Fazaluddin; Sandbulte, Jomara ID 180 Collaborative Human-AI Risk Annotation: Co-Annotating Online Incivility with CHAIRA by Park, Jinkyung Katie; Ellezhuthil, Rahul Dev; Wisniewski, Pamela; Singh, Vivek ID 359 Does Google dream of electric memes? From human to computational culture  by Smith, Alexander O; Joh, Una; Hemsley, Jeff ID 362 Conceptual approaches to information-as-potentiality  Chassanoff, Alexandra; Chen, Annie Best Short Research Paper Award Finalists (500 USD) ID 132 Discourses of Fear around AI and their Implications for Library and Information Science  by Appedu, Sarah; Qin, Yigang ID 135 Evaluating Techniques of Artificial Intelligence for Social Robots  by Barfield, Jessica ID 188 ‘Everyone has their reasons for curating the data they have decided to keep’: A Thematic Analysis of Datahoarding as Digital Curation Practice  by Maemura, Emily; Wagner, Travis L. ID 202 The Promoting Effect of Internet Use on the Physical Health of Chinese Older Adults: An Empirical Study Based on the Difference-in-Differences Model by Sun, Haoyuan; Fu, Zhenkang; Pu, Zhengtong; Zhu, Qinghua ID 366 “Just because we can, does it mean we should?” The Integrated Data Infrastructure in Aotearoa, and its implications for Māori by Boey, Daphne; Toland, Janet; Campbell-Meier, Jennifer; Lilley, Spencer Best Poster Award Finalists (300 USD) ID 181 The impact of Economic Sanctions on China-U.S. Scientific collaboration: Evidence from the Civilian Universities on the U.S. Entity List  by Lu, Chao;  Xiao, Chengrui ID 212 Decoding Climate Data Modeling and its Impacts  by Dave, Aashka ID 258 A Comparative Institutional Analysis of Software Accessibility Laws, Policies, and Guidelines  by Zhou, Kyrie Zhixuan; Sanfilippo, Madelyn Rose ID 310 Generative AI in the Creative Domain: Innovation or Interference? Preliminary insights from online discussions  by Lee, Hyun Seung; Luo, Manman ID 425 Evaluating the language style of AI-generated peer review  by Zheng, Xiang; Xiong, Tiancheng Best Chinese Research Paper Award Finalists (1.000USD) ID 449 融合大语言模型的中国古代山水志史料知识重构与可视化路径研究  by Zhou, Shubin; Cheng, Shuangling ID 463 走向数智时代的“诗和远方”:智慧文旅平台用户承诺研究  by Zhao, ZeRui; Luo, YaLing ID 465 融合SBERT和DTM模型的颠覆性技术识别方法研究 —以中国氢储能领域为例  by 张, 力月; 鲍, 泽孟鸿; 吕, 鲲 ID 519 Value-Added Logics of Humanities Data: A Case Study on Digital Humanities Projects  by Jian, Hua; Wang, Xiaoguang; Hou, Xilong ID 555 Research on the Framework of Action for Libraries to Contribute to the Realization of the Goals of Sustainable Development in Society ——Using IFLA SDGs Stories as Examples  by Tang, Qiong; Ma, Yunzhe; He, JiaYu

The iSchools Organisation is happy to announce that the Institute of Information Management of the University of the Punjab (Pakistan) joined the iSchools at the Associate Level. University of the Punjab, Pakistan The Institute of Information Management (IIM) at the University of the Punjab, Lahore, provides high-quality education and research to support Pakistan’s evolving information society. With a distinguished faculty of PhDs and visiting experts, IIM has developed robust infrastructure to adapt to digital advancements. Recognizing the shift from physical libraries to digital environments, the institute rebranded from ‘Library and Information Science’ to ‘Information Management’ in 2014 to address emerging needs. University of the Punjab, Pakistan Established in 1915 by Asa Don Dickenson, IIM is Asia’s oldest institution in this field, pioneering research and education. Upgraded to an institute in 2021, it offers BS, Master’s, MPhil, and PhD programs, producing top professionals nationally and interna-tionally. IIM ranked 51-70 in the QS subject rankings (2024) and leads Pakistan in PhD faculty and research publications. Since 1996, it has published Pakistan Journal of Information Management & Libraries, a SCOPUS-indexed journal. The iSchools organization was founded two decades ago with roots dating back to the late 1980s. The iSchools educate thought-leaders of the future, and their researchers focus on enhancing the lives of people, the productivity of companies, the innovation cycles of industries, the design of technologies, the policies that govern technology and information use, information services to communities, and much more . The iSchools Organisation currently consists of more than 130 iSchools worldwide.

The iSchools Organization is happy to announce that the iConference 2026 will be hosted by the Edinburgh Napier University in the United Kingdom, Europe! City of Edinburgh The iConference is an annual gathering of a broad spectrum of scholars and researchers from around the world who share a common concern about critical information issues in contemporary society. The iConference pushes the boundaries of information studies, explores core concepts and ideas, and creates new technological and conceptual configurations—all situated in interdisciplinary discourses. ​ The iConference series was established in 2005 by the  iSchools Organization , a growing worldwide association of Information Schools dedicated to advancing the information field, and preparing students to meet the information challenges of the 21st Century. Each annual iConference is hosted by a different  iSchools member institution  or co-hosted by members jointly. The iConference locations rotate annually to maximize representation and participation of the iSchools members in all three regions.  With iConference 2025 taking place in the US, iConference 2026 will again be hosted in the European/African Region. Edinburgh Napier University iConference 2026 will be hosted by Edinburgh Napier University. The School of Computing, Engineering & the Built Environment at Edinburgh Napier University joined the iSchools Organization in 2023. The University is the number one modern university in Scotland (Times Higher Education World University Rankings 2023), a top 10 UK modern university (Times/Sunday Times Good University Guide 2023), and the top Scottish modern university for research power and impact (Research Excellence Framework 2021). Edinburgh Napier University's Craiglockhart Campus provides an ideal setting for hosting the 2026 iConference, offering a unique blend of historic elegance and cutting-edge facilities. Nestled in scenic surroundings with views of Edinburgh, the campus merges traditional architecture with modern amenities, creating an inspiring environment for academic exchange and collaboration. Edinburgh Napier University iConference 2026 will be the 21st iConference in the series taking place in March/April 2026. The call for papers will be announced in summer 2025.

Issue #102 by Michael Seadle  (Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin) In February 2025, Stuart Macdonald wrote a blog post called “Does Authorship Mean Anything When Academic Papers Are Simply Citable Tokens?”¹ in the LSE [London School of Economics] blog on the “Impact of Social Sciences”. He writes that “... papers are less valued for their content than for providing measures of academic performance.”¹ There are plenty of examples of abuses. Macdonald claims that “When Elsevier provided its authors with an example of good citation style, over 500 cited the completely fictional example.”¹  One of his biggest concerns is about manipulating metrics. “For instance, coercive citation (editors making citation of their own journals a condition of publication) is particularly prevalent in top journals. Over 90% of their authors comply.”¹ ² Accommodating this kind of coercion is widespread. ³  COPE’s guidelines have also addressed this problem directly, which suggests how common the problem is.⁴    The number of simple manipulations can be effective: “A tweak or two can make a huge difference to fortunes: re-classification of ‘meeting abstracts’ to ‘academic papers’ resulted in one Biology journal increasing its JIF from 0.24 to 18.3 in a year.”¹ This is not a matter of simple exceptions to normal practices. Another form of manipulation is to add co-authors: “The number of authors per paper has grown rapidly; co-authors will each self-cite and hugely increase paper citation, JIF and all that hangs from these. … Papers in Physics journals can have hundreds of authors…”¹     Macdonald writes that: “The role of academic publishing was once to distribute knowledge from research to the public at large. Now the customer is the academic, paying the publisher direct for required performance measures. … ‘Scholars’, then, pay to be published and look to papers that can be cited almost anywhere in support of almost anything for the greatest return.”¹     It is easy to blame publishers for being greedy, but the issue represents a broader problem in an environment where citation quantity has become the measure of quality. The academic leadership of universities are equally to blame for fostering an environment where positions, promotions, and pay depend directly on citation success. No individual can change this. It will take a community effort to restore the primacy of content as the goal of writing academic papers. 1 : Macdonald, Stuart. 2025. “Does Authorship Mean Anything When Academic Papers Are Simply Citable Tokens?” Impact of Social Sciences  (blog). February 17, 2025.   https://blogs.lse.ac.uk/impactofsocialsciences/2025/02/17/does-authorship-mean-anything-when-academic-papers-are-simply-citable-tokens/ . 2 :   This happens also in the LIS field. I can share a recent example privately. 3 : Fong, Eric A., Ravi Patnayakuni, and Allen W. Wilhite. 2023. “Accommodating Coercion: Authors, Editors, and Citations.” Research Policy  52 (5): 104754.   https://doi.org/10.1016/j.respol.2023.104754 .4 : “Editor and Reviewers Requiring Authors to Cite Their Own Work.” n.d. COPE: Committee on Publication Ethics. Accessed February 23, 2025.   https://publicationethics.org/guidance/case/editor-and-reviewers-requiring-authors-cite-their-own-work . Feature Stories solely reflect the opinion of the author.

Issue #101 by Gary Marchionini  (UNC School of Information & Library Science) A bit over 40 years ago I career transitioned from mathematics education to information science and joined the faculty at UMD . To gain some perspective, I sat in on the information science seminar taught by Lawrence Heilprin. One large impression I took away from Dr. Heilprin was his statement that ‘compression is a fundamental problem of information science.’ He was referring to indexing and abstracting as library functions that mapped long-form information onto compressions that are quickly consumable by humans and to serve as the basis for selective dissemination services. I took this to mean how do we learn what we need effectively and efficiently. How do humans thrive in an environment that offers (or increasing assaults us with) enormous volumes of stimuli, yet we are somehow able to accept and process the specific signals that help us understand and solve our problems? Today we use metaphors like ‘drinking from the information firehose’ to describe the information overload problem and ‘sensemaking’ to describe the compression of those streams into thoughts that comprise our understandings and actions. This life-long grapple with the problem of getting the right information to the right person at the right time when faced with massive candidate information streams is especially poignant in today’s world of social media, global information networks, and artificial tools and agents.   Responsibility for meeting this challenge has historically been the purview of expert humans in fields like library and information science, however, new tools and new kinds of human behavior make it increasing necessary to supplement human expertise with technological aids and also to segment and assign some of the workflow to automation. A flurry of new research papers illustrates this trend and raises questions about what information processing tasks are best assigned to machines and what tasks require human execution. Two threads in recent papers illustrate our growing effort to understand and meet this challenge.   First, there is continued evidence of human capabilities and limitations in working in high-intensity information environments. A recent paper titled “The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s?”¹ in the January 2025 issue of Neuron  reviews decades of research on how rapidly humans perceive and process information. Zheng and Meister examine the slowness of human action across many kinds of tasks ranging from reading, listening, speaking, and typing to memorization, object recognition, and skilled game execution. They use information-theory metrics to conclude that humans execute these tasks in the 5 to 50 bits/second range - i.e., 10 bps order of magnitude across tasks. They compare this to the gigabit per second processing of the human perceptual system and state “our brain will never extract more than 10 bps of that giant bitstream.” They discuss different hypotheses for the size (100,000,000) of what they term the ‘sifting number’ (filter) defined as the ratio of sensory information rate to behavioral throughput rate, as well as hypotheses of storage capacity, evolutionary biology and neural architecture, and brain-computer interfaces. They propose an ‘inner brain’ and ‘outer brain’ architecture that explains our species’ speed of being. While examining the various theoretical explanations for these throughput differences between perception and action, the authors point out that machines operate at much higher rates on both perception and action dimensions and suggest that there are ecological niches (e.g., transportation) where humanity might be better served by getting out of the way and assigning such tasks to machines. Humans will always want to be the ones to decide which tasks get assigned.   The range of human performance rates has been studied in the human-factors literature for decades. Dennis Egan had a chapter in the first edition of the Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction (1988)² in which he reviewed studies of performance ranges for different tasks (e.g., text editing, information search, and programming) with the largest ratios from fastest to slowest of 7:1 for text editing, 16:1 for search, and 28:1 for programming (experts) and discussed how complexity of task increased the range between fastest and slowest performance. These studies will help us in segmenting and assigning tasks to machines. The respective capability and limitation tradeoffs of humans and machines are now far beyond those expressed in the 19th century folklore of John Henry racing the steam engine to drill rock.   Second, there is increasing evidence that humans are learning and behaving in new ways. New longitudinal studies of how adolescents use social media and smart phones and what are some of the correlational physiological and behavioral effects raise related questions about human roles in information processing, learning, and living. Several research groups have been collecting data from cohorts of sometimes hundreds of adolescents’ use of smartphones over multiple years using mixed methods that include surveys, interviews, logging, and fMRI scans. One paper, Maza et.al published in the Journal of the American Medical Association-Pediatrics³ followed adolescents’ use of 3 social media platforms over two years and found “different neural patterns based on their social media checking behavior.” Other work by this group (Haag et.al ., 2024)⁴ with the same cohort of 170 adolescents focused on anxiety, stress, and depression and found that these adolescents used their smart phones for large portions of their day (median use 543 minutes per day— 9 hours a day!), however, negative effects were not related to total amount of use but rather to the kinds of smartphone use (e.g., social media use to seek social and mental support). Another research group’s recent paper on smartphone use in schools with 117 students reported a median of 5.5 hours per day of smartphone use with a median of 2 of those hours taking place while in school (Christakis et.al , 2025)⁵. Clearly, we are learning that our large portions of our time at early stages of brain and psychological development are devoted to new kinds of mediated interactions that influence our information seeking and consumption practices and physical development. These results have implications for how we evolve with technologies that have fundamentally different information processing and physical action performance ranges.   The grand challenge of the right information to the right person at the right time is increasingly influenced by information tools and services that may be inextricably connected to our information needs and the external repositories and streams of potential resources to meet those needs. Human information processing practices are evolving, and information scientists and professionals are engaged in understanding and hopefully guiding these practices.  1 : Zheng, J., & Meister, M. (2025). The unbearable slowness of being: Why do we live at 10 bits/s? Neuron, Volume 113(Issue 2), S. 192-204. doi: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.neuron.2024.11.008 2 : Egan, D. (1988). Chapter 24. Individual Differences in Human-Computer Interaction. In M. Helander (Hrsg.), Handbook of Human-Computer Interaction (S. 543-568). Amsterdam: North-Holland. 3 : Maza MT, Fox KA, Kwon S, et al. Association of Habitual Checking Behaviors on Social Media With Longitudinal Functional Brain Development. JAMA Pediatr. 2023;177(2):160–167. doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2022.4924 4 : Haag, A-C., Nick, E.A., Chen, M.S., Telzer, E.H., Prinstein, M.J., & Bonanno, G.A. (in press).  Investigating risk profiles of smartphone activities and psychosocial factors in adolescents during the COVID-19 pandemic . Journal of Research on Adolescence, 35, 1-17 5 : Christakis DA, Mathew GM, Reichenberger DA, Rodriguez IR, Ren B, Hale L. Adolescent Smartphone Use During School Hours. JAMA Pediatr. Published online February 03, 2025. doi:10.1001/jamapediatrics.2024.6627 Feature Stories solely reflect the opinion of the author.