(via the American Library Association)
Please join us in congratulating Elaine Toms, Emily Knox and Soo Young Rieh on their election to the Association for Information Science and Technology Board of Directors. Their terms will begin on November 1, 2017. More information about the incoming Board members is below.
Elaine Toms is currently Professor of Information Innovation & Management, Management School, University of Sheffield, UK. She previously held posts at the iSchool, University of Sheffield; the Faculty of Management, and School of Information Studies, Dalhousie University, Halifax, Canada; and the Faculty of Information, University of Toronto, also in Canada. She was the first information scientist to be appointed to a Canada Research Chair. Over the course of her career, she has held multiple administration roles (e.g., Director of Teaching Quality & Enhancement, and of Research); been actively engaged in professional associations including ASIST (serving on the Board of Directors); has served as program chair for multiple conferences (e.g., ASIST, Hypertext, and JCDL); and currently serves on the editorial board of IPM and is an associate editor of JASIST.
She completed her PhD at Western University (Canada) from which she went on to examine multiple facets of the information interaction problem from interface issues to interruptions and task, with a particular focus on evaluation. Her work has been funded by multiple groups on both sides of the pond (e.g., both the science and social science research councils in Canada, OCLC, Heritage Canada, Canada Foundation for Innovation, Horizon 2020). She has been an investigator with multiple research networks (e.g., NECTAR, Network for Effective Collaboration Through Advanced Research; PROMISE (Participative Research labOratory for Multimedia and Multilingual Information Systems Evaluation).
Emily Knox is an assistant professor in the School of Information Sciences at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Her research interests include information access, intellectual freedom and censorship, information ethics, information policy, and the intersection of print culture and reading practices. She is also a member of the Mapping Information Access research team. Emily recently edited Trigger Warnings: History, Theory Context, published by Rowman & Littlefield. Her previous book, Book Banning in 21st Century America, was also published by Rowman & Littlefield and is the first monograph in the Beta Phi Mu Scholars’ Series. Emily received her Ph.D. from the doctoral program at the Rutgers University School of Communication & Information. Her master’s in library and information science is from the iSchool at Illinois. She also holds a B.A. in Religious Studies from Smith College and an A.M. in the same field from The University of Chicago Divinity School. Emily serves on the boards of the Freedom to Read Foundation, National Coalition Against Censorship, and Beta Phi Mu and is the treasurer of the Information Ethics and Policy SIG.
Soo Young Rieh is an Associate Professor in the School of Information at the University of Michigan where she has served as the Director of the Master of Science in Information (MSI) program since 2014. Rieh’s research investigates information behavior and human information interaction, focusing on credibility assessment, searching as learning, social search, and information literacy. Her research projects have been funded by the MacArthur Foundation and the Institute of Museum and Library Services (IMLS). Since Rieh joined ASIS&T as a student member in 1994, she has been very active in ASIS&T, serving as SIG Cabinet Steering Committee Officer, Co-chair of Awards and Honors Committee, Chair of the ASIS&T SIG in Information Needs Seeking and Use (SIGUSE), and a jury member for both the Research in Information Science Award and the Doctoral Dissertation Proposal Scholarship. Additionally, she has served on the Editorial Board for JASIST since 2014. Outside of ASIST, Rieh co-chaired the 2017 iSchools Dissertation Award and she is currently a member of the Editorial Board for the journal Library and Information Science Research. Rieh has received several research awards from ASIS&T including the Best JASIST Paper Award (2011, 2005), the ASIS&T Best Conference Paper Award (2010), and the ASIS&T SIG USE Award for Best Information Behavior Conference Paper (2007, 2015). She received her Ph.D. from the Rutgers University School of Communication, Information, and Library Studies.