IRRT Blog: 2016

Thursday, December 15, 2016

December issue of International Leads published

The December issue of International Leads is now available for viewing.

Stories featured in this issue include a look at the deepening ties between universities in Peru and Vermont; India's largest online library for the print disabled; celebrating 25 years at the Mortenson Centre for International Library Programs; connecting, collaborating and building community at the 2016 IFLA World Congress; and recommended resources in support of the United Nations Sustainability Goals 2030.

The issue begins with inspiring thoughts from IRRT Chair Elizabeth Cramer and Chair-Elect Loida Garcia-Febo:

All types of libraries, including academic, public, school, and special, can join efforts to promote the SDGs in their countries and cities. As per the United Nations, the SDGs are a universal call to action to end poverty, protect the planet and ensure that all people enjoy peace and prosperity.

Libraries from all over the world are already helping their communities and countries to achieve the SDGS by providing information and in many cases collaborating with agencies and organizations in efforts related to the environment, gender equality, sustainable cities, clean water, quality education, peace, justice, and strong institutions, among others. We would like to encourage libraries and library workers to continue advocating that libraries and access to information be placed on the agenda of decision makers. IFLA’s Access and Opportunity for All: How Libraries Contribute to the United Nations 2030 Agenda, is a booklet with useful examples and recommendations for policymakers demonstrating the contribution of libraries to the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). The materials also include a handout which librarians could adapt or distribute when meeting with decision makers.

Related to these efforts, a new multi-year programme was announced, the International Advocacy Programme (IAP). The goal is to "develop the IAP to give the library sector the capacity to create and promote a favorable policy framework for valued library services to the community, set and implement regional and national action agendas, and build advocacy skills."

Read all the stories for even more inspiration on the IRRT website http://www.ala.org/irrt/intlleads/internationalleads

Sunday, December 11, 2016

The ALA International Relations Round Table (IRRT) International Poster Sessions Committee invites you to submit poster session proposals on international themes for the 2017 ALA Annual Conference in Chicago!

The poster session committee encourages submissions from all types of libraries and on any topic relevant to international librarianship. Submissions may include a description of an innovative library program; an analysis of a solution to a problem; a report of a research study; or any other presentation that would benefit the larger library community.

Poster session participants place materials such as pictures, data, graphs, diagrams and narrative text on boards that are usually 4 x 8 feet. During their assigned 1½ hour time periods, participants informally discuss their presentations with conference attendees. Titles/abstracts from previous years are available onALA Connect (note that this site is only serving as an archive for previous Annual Conference poster sessions – for information on this year's posters, go to the2017 ALA poster session website).

The deadline for submitting an application is February 3, 2017. Applicants will be notified by the end of March, after a double blind peer review process, whether their submission has been accepted for presentation at the conference. The 2015 ALA Annual Poster Sessions will be held June 24 and 25, 2017 (the Saturdayand Sunday of the conference) in the exhibits hall.

Start your application process now. You must create a username and password for the site before you submit your application, you must choose to submit a poster session proposal after you log-in, and you will receive a confirmation e-mail after you have completed your submission.

Additional questions regarding international poster sessions can be directed to:

Sara Margaret Rizzo, co-chair of the IRRT International Poster Session Committee,srizzo@caldwell.edu

Laura N. Evans, co-chair of the IRRT International Poster Session Committee,evans@binghamton.edu

Call for Proposals for Presentation at the IRRT Chair's Program at ALA Annual Conference

Call for Proposals (CFP) for Presentation at the IRRT Chair's Program at ALA Annual Conference

The American Library Association (ALA) International Relations Round Table (IRRT) Chair's Program Committee invites proposals for participation in a panel presentation that will take place at the annual ALA conference in Chicago. The panel presentation will be featured in the IRRT Chair's Program session.

Each year, the IRRT Chair's Program features speakers presenting on a specific theme related to international relations and the library. This year, the theme for the IRRT Chair's Program is:

Acting for Humanity: The United Nations Sustainable Development Goals and Libraries

In 2015, 150 world leaders, with support from the United Nations Development Programme, adopted 17 Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) to fight against injustice, poverty, inequality, and climate change. This program will address how we, as librarians and libraries, can take action to better the lives of all people and protect our planet.

The Chair's Program Committee seeks proposals from speakers who will be part of a panel that will describe and share the following:

1. How individuals, libraries, or library associations are providing programming and education to advance peace and justice, alleviate poverty and hunger, reduce inequality, increase women’s rights and political participation, or protect the environment.

2. How individuals, libraries, or library associations are working with their governments, communities, and/or partners to advance peace and justice, alleviate poverty and hunger, reduce inequality, increase women’s rights and political participation, or protect the environment.

Examples of topics (presentations are NOT limited to these topics; creativity is welcomed and encouraged):

● Promotion of sustainability either through practice or community outreach

● Providing programming or services promoting gender equality and empowerment of all women and girls

● Providing programming or services that encourage political participation from historically underrepresented groups

● Fighting poverty and hunger, allowing all to live with dignity

● Promoting policies or practices that support sustainable long-term management of natural resources on land or water

● Taking action on climate change

● Creating partnerships, programming or services that promote education, literacy, basic human rights and quality of life

● Providing programming and services, or promoting policies and practices, to those within the justice system. For example, promoting government transparency and accountability, including the reduction of corruption, violence in society, and the enforcement of laws.

International librarians, library administrators, and library partners are especially encouraged to submit proposals.

Presentation Format:

The panel presentation will immediately follow the brief IRRT Chair's Business Meeting, which will begin sharply at Monday, June 26, 1:00 p.m. Each panel presentation will be between 15-20 minutes. Applicants are encouraged to consider creative and effective presentations to connect attendees with the topic.

Deadline:

All proposals must be submitted by January 18, 2017, for priority consideration.

Submission Guidelines:

Proposals should include:

1. Title of the presentation

2. A 150- to 250-word biography of the presenters/panelists

3. Name, title, institutional affiliation, and full contact information of the presenters/panelists

4. An abstract of 300-500 words, describing the focus of the presentation, on a separate sheet that does not include the name and affiliation of the presenter or presenters

Proposals should be submitted electronically (as a single Microsoft Word or PDF attachment) to Jeremiah Paschke-Wood at jpaschkewood@email.arizona.edu.

Thursday, December 8, 2016

Call for Papers - IFLA Satellite Meeting, Multiethnicity in Genealogy, Local History and Regional Memory

Call for Papers - Satellite Meeting - Vilnius August 2017-The Challenge of Multiple Identities

The Genealogy and Local History Section, with the Asia & Oceania and the IT Section, invites proposals for Satellite Meeting:

Vilnius, Lithuania,15-17 August 2017

Theme: Multiethnicity in Genealogy, Local History and Regional Memory - Challenges and Opportunities for Libraries and other Memory Institutions

Location: Martynas Mažvydas National Library of Lithuania

Deadline for submitting proposals is 15 February 2017.

For more information, please visit:

http://2017.ifla.org/cfp-calls/genealogy-joint-with-asia-and-it

Contact information: Cherie Bush (Family Search Org.) at bushcd@familysearch.org

or Bozena Rasmussen at bozennara@gmail.com

Please feel free to share the Call for Papers in your networks.

Bozena Rasmussen

Chair

IFLA Genealogy and Local History SC

CALL FOR PAPERS BigScholar 2017 The 4th WWW Workshop on Big Scholarly Data: Towards the Web of Scholars

CALL FOR PAPERS

BigScholar 2017

The 4th WWW Workshop on Big Scholarly Data: Towards the Web of Scholars

http://thealphalab.org/bigscholar/

A workshop of WWW 2017 (The 26th International World Wide Web Conference)

Perth, Australia, April 3-7, 2017

Researchers worldwide are currently producing more and more scholarly data of various types such as papers, books, patents, etc. Such data are big data by nature. For example, the DBLP Computer Science Bibliography and the Microsoft Academic Graph/API (research.microsoft.com/mag) provide bibliographic information on major computer science journals and proceedings. DBLP and MAG index more than 3 and 100 million articles, respectively, with records containing title, pages, years and authors' information, etc. Concurrently, scholars are associated with various academic activities such as conferences, workshops, congresses, peer review and so on. Such scenarios have motivated us to also explore the Web of Scholars in the context of big scholarly data on a global scale. It is imperative and vital for researchers to drive their knowledge towards the innovative generation of values from Big Scholarly Data. The emerging worldwide Web of Scholars demands a re-evaluation of existing techniques, such as data mining, recommender systems and social network analysis. Furthermore, there is the demand for novel ways of developing algorithms, methods and techniques to foster the analysis and interpretation of social environments such as academic collaboration networks.

Following the success of the previous three editions, the BigScholar 2017 workshop aims at bringing together researchers and practitioners working on Big Scholarly Data to discuss what are emerging research issues and how to explore the Web of Scholars. Several core challenges, such as the tools and methods for analyzing and mining scholarly data will be the main center of discussions at the workshop. The goal is to contribute to the birth of a community having a shared interest around the Web of Scholars and exploring it using data mining, recommender systems, social network analysis and other appropriate technologies.

The workshop will be a full-day workshop. The format of the workshop will include 1-2 invited talks (keynotes), research and position paper presentations, and one discussion panel. The workshop will be held in April 2017 in Perth, Australia, in conjunction with the 26th International World Wide Web Conference (WWW 2017).

In this workshop, we will explore the most promising areas of research in big scholarly data, with focus on major foci of the rapidly emerging field of the Web of Scholars. This workshop also seeks to answer noteworthy research questions such as:

- How to model the Web of scholars?

- How to connect scholars on the Web?

- How to measure impact of publications, researchers, groups, or institutions?

- How to visualize Big Scholarly Data for insights and analytics?

- How to utilize the Web of Scholars to improve the way research is being done?

Researchers are welcome to submit highly interesting and quality papers that address these questions above and other topics below which may include, but are not limited to:

- Academic social network analysis

- Scientific measurement

- Scholarly data management

- Digital infrastructures for accessing scholarly data

- Methods and tools for analyzing and visualizing big scholarly data

- Indexing, searching, and mining scholarly data

- Connecting scholars using a Web approach

- Paradigms to promote scientific collaboration

- Scientific trends prediction

- Web tools and techniques for big scholarly data

- Systems, platforms, and services exploring the Web of Scholars

- Applications and use cases of big scholarly data

IMPORTANT DATES:

Paper Submission Deadline: January 20, 2017 (firm)

Author Notification: January 31, 2017

Final Manuscript: February 14, 2017

SUBMISSION INSTRUCTIONS:

Authors are invited to submit original papers that must not have been submitted to or published in any other workshop, conference, or journal. The workshop will accept full papers describing completed work, work-in-progress papers with preliminary results, as well as position papers reporting inspiring and intriguing new ideas.

All submitted papers must:

* be written in English;

* contain author names, affiliations, and email addresses;

* be formatted according to the ACM SIG Proceedings template(http://www.acm.org/sigs/publications/proceedings-templates) with a font size no smaller than 9pt;

* be in PDF (make sure that the PDF can be viewed on any platform), and formatted for US Letter size;

* occupy no more than six pages, including the abstract, references, and appendices.

It is the authors' responsibility to ensure that their submissions adhere strictly to the required format.

Submissions that do not comply with the above guidelines may be rejected without review.

All submissions will be peer-reviewed by members of the Program Committee and be evaluated for originality, quality and appropriateness to the workshop. At least one author of each accepted papers must present their work at the workshop. All accepted and presented papers will be published in the Companion Proceedings of the WWW 2017 conference, through the ACM Digital Library. Extended versions of selected papers will be considered for publication in special issues of SCI-index international journals.

Please submit your paper here:

https://easychair.org/conferences/?conf=bigscholar2017

Organizers:

Feng Xia, Dalian University of Technology

Huan Liu, Arizona State University

Irwin King, The Chinese University of Hong Kong

Kuansan Wang, Microsoft Research

Contact Info:

Email: bigscholar@googlegroups.com

Poster session participants place materials such as pictures, data, graphs, diagrams and narrative text on boards that are usually 4 x 8 feet. During their assigned 1½ hour time periods, participants informally discuss their presentations with conference attendees. Titles/abstracts from previous years are available on ALA Connect (note that this site is only serving as an archive for previous Annual Conference poster sessions – for information on this year's posters, go to the 2017 ALA poster session website).

The deadline for submitting an application is February 3, 2017. Applicants will be notified by the end of March, after a double blind peer review process, whether their submission has been accepted for presentation at the conference. The 2015 ALA Annual Poster Sessions will be held June 24 and 25, 2017 (the Saturday and Sunday of the conference) in the exhibits hall.

Additional questions regarding international poster sessions can be directed to:

Sara Margaret Rizzo, co-chair of the IRRT International Poster Session Committee, srizzo@caldwell.edu

Laura N. Evans, co-chair of the IRRT International Poster Session Committee, evans@binghamton.edu

Tuesday, December 6, 2016

Call for Proposals (CFP) - IRRT Chair's Program at ALA Annual Conference

Call for Proposals (CFP) for Presentation at the IRRT Chair's Program at ALA Annual Conference