The Fifth Annual iConference, Feb. 3-6, 2010 at the University of
Illinois, 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 affect 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.

Location