AISTI Annual Report 2005
January 26, 2005
On behalf of the Directors of the Alliance for Innovation in Scientific and Technical Information, I am pleased to submit the 2004-2005 Annual Report. As 2005 closes, AISTI celebrates its 15th year as a collaborative organization comprised of a highly diverse membership. When confronted with the challenges and opportunities in our increasingly dynamic and rapidly changing STI environments, AISTI's focus on innovation has manifest itself in multiple dimensions, as described herein.
AISTI Developments in the enclosed Annual Report provides a highlighted list of events and accomplishments over the past two years. I'd like to highlight a few innovative characteristics of our organization here by calling your attention to the following:
- Agility: AISTI's size and organizational structure enable quick action and decision making on time sensitive issues in support of the membership. On short notice, twice AISTI has sponsored the international travel of Jeroen Baekert of LANL to advocate the digital library view to the MPEG-21 standardization committee and to partner with NISO on advocating broader standardization adoption of the OpenURL. These efforts have enabled AISTI members to play a role in moving digital library standards forward beyond the library community in a manner which individual institutions would be unable to accomplish.
- Learning: The Santa Fe Mini Conference has become an eagerly awaited tradition, providing all categories of membership the opportunity to interact with key international players in both the information world and the scientific community. Our quarterly Board of Director's meetings continue the "digital ideas club" theme and the "Innovation Forum" where we explore the future of e-scholarship with outside experts.
- Component organizational model: AISTI continues to integrate special interests components, reflecting the needs and interests of our membership. Examples of special interest components include: the Emerging Research Summit; Buying consortia; the Digital Ideas club round-table; The category of Observer member was created to provide a means for non-members to get a glimpse of AISTI prior to making the decision to commit the resources required for fuller participation.
- Innovation: The Emerging Research Summit was launched to stimulate and support cutting-edge innovation. Results from those efforts include a funded Mellon grant, the release of open source software to expose grey literature via Apache servers, and the newly initiated support for data transfer of KARST Scanned Electron Micrographs. Additional improvements and developments can be found on our web site at www.aisti.org
On a personal note, our Executive Director, Corinne Lebrun, in addition to providing energy and creative thinking while ensuring our business stability, has lifted what could be tedious administrative requirements inherent in the job of Chair. Corinne's strong organizational skills made my responsibilities both painless and pleasurable.
AISTI has not only matured but continues to innovate in its organizational evolution, adding in important ways to its stature in the scientific and technical information world. It has personally been a pleasure to serve as chair for the past two years and be an active part of such an innovative, flexible, evolving organization. We look forward to a continued track record of innovation and successes in 2006.
Rick Luce
Chair, 2004 and 2005
