Access Innovations, Inc. is arranging a meeting in the style of the historic ASIDIC meetings. The meeting will be September 24 – 25, 2017 in Albuquerque, New Mexico. ASIDIC meetings were small and focused on topics relevant to then-current significant industry issues and were held in various venues in the United States and Canada.
“This meeting is a essentially a reunion of those who led us into the current information age as secondary database creators, hosts of secondary files, and large scale users of information as that information became digital 50 years ago. We had a lot of fun along the way!” said Marjorie Hlava. “For me, the genesis of this meeting was the death of Dr. Daniel U. Wilde, one of those who made search available to the public in the days of NASA’s technology transfer programs.”
For the reunion meeting, two former Presidents of ASIDIC, Marjorie Hlava, President of Access Innovations, and Tom Hogan, Sr., CEO, and President of Information Today, Inc. are the technical program co-chairs. Presentation proposals and ideas for the technical program should be sent to them at mhlava@accessinn.com and hoganiti@aol.com.
The conference will be held at the Hotel Parq Central, a historic hotel near downtown Albuquerque. The Monday night dinner will be held at the National Museum of Nuclear Science and History. Attendees interested in a Sunday morning golf outing will be able to enjoy the Pa-ako Ridge Golf Club, one of the most beautiful courses in the United States.
Registration is open now and will close on September 20, 2017. For hotel reservations, contact the hotel at (505) 242-0400 or via email and ask for the ASIDIC Revisited rate of $125 for a king room or $145 for a room with two double beds. An upscale continental breakfast is included with all rooms and the hotel offers a free airport shuttle.
Access Innovations will be organizing the meeting on a break even basis. Organizations interested in providing sponsorships to assist with expenses should contact Heather Kotula, VP of Marketing and Communication, no later than August 15, 2017, at hkotula@accessinn.com. If the meeting generates revenue, the proceeds will be donated to a local charity.
Registration is open now and will close on September 20, 2017. For hotel reservations, contact the hotel at (505) 242-0040 or via email and ask for the ASIDIC Revisited rate of $125 for a king room or $145 for a two-double bed room. An upscale continental breakfast is included with all rooms and the hotel offers a free airport shuttle.
Additional information about the program will be available soon. To receive updates directly, click here to be added to the ASIDIC Revisited mailing list.
About Access Innovations, Inc. – www.accessinn.com, www.taxodiary.com Founded in 1978, Access Innovations has extensive experience with Internet technology applications, master data management, database creation, thesaurus/taxonomy creation, and semantic integration. Access Innovations’ Data Harmony software includes machine aided indexing, thesaurus management, an XML Intranet System (XIS), and metadata extraction for content creation developed to meet production environment needs. Data Harmony is used by publishers, governments, and corporate clients throughout the world.
About ASIDIC – http://www.nfais.org/asidic-history Discussion of problems and needs, coupled with encouragement from CAS, led to the formation of the Association of Scientific Information Dissemination Centers in 1968. Charter members included Eastman Kodak Company, Illinois Institute of Technology (IIT) Research Institute, the Universities of Pittsburgh and Georgia, the Dow Chemical Company, and the National Science Library of Canada. These organizations were the “tape spinners” of the day – loading large databases on computers and running queries against them to support the research community.
In 1976, ASIDIC changed its name to the Association of Information and Dissemination Centers, and membership was expanded to include database producers as full members. At its height, the association was composed of members representing both public and private organizations across the United States and around the world. Within the private sector, both for-profit and non-profit organizations were included. It was a loosely organized group with a part time secretariat supporting the member volunteers who did all program support.
The major activity of ASIDIC was its semi-annual meetings. These were held in a variety of venues in the U.S. and Canada. Topics relevant to the significant industry issues of the day were chosen at the meeting as it ended for the next meeting. This ensured that the most relevant and current topics were on the program. Nearly everyone in the audience was also a potential speaker and the debates on the topics of the day became legendary. The group often broke into focus groups to discuss possible solutions or directions for the industry and as all stakeholders were represented solutions could be quickly reached.
ASIDIC enjoyed a long history in the information industry, celebrating its 25th anniversary in 1993 and its 40th in 2008. However, as the information industry changed and the number of conferences increased, membership and attendance at ASIDIC meetings declined, and the long-term financial viability of the Association became doubtful. After many discussions and a survey of the membership, the executive committee recommended that ASIDIC should “locate another not-for-profit information industry organization who is interested in and willing to orchestrate a mutually beneficial merger of the two organizations”. A vote of the then-current members of ASIDIC was conducted and ratified by the executive committee on June 30, 2010. Effective the following day, ASIDIC ceased to exist and its members became NFAIS members. No other meeting of this style has emerged to take its place.
