Editor's desktop

Research data and preservation (RDAP) is an area presently receiving intense focus from information professionals. This issue features extensive coverage of the ASIS&T RDAP Summit 2013 assembled very ably by guest editors, Susan Wells Parham, Elizabeth Rolando and Jennifer Doty. Panel organizers, speakers and attendees discuss the Summit and many aspects of the RDAP challenge. Areas covered include repositories, curation, partnerships, infrastructure, data use and reuse and data citation and metrics. From an ASIS&T sponsored event, we next turn to ASIS&T as an organization, including ASIS&T President Andrew Dillon's reflections on what ASIS&T and similar organizations must do to stay relevant and the late Douglas Engelbart's thoughts on our future. Specific examples of ASIS&T's current evolution as Mei-Mei Wu and Diane Sonnenwald report on the results of an International Relations Committee survey on the feasibility of holding Annual Meetings outside North America and Emil Levine covers progress in the formation of an Asian Pacific Chapter. We are, indeed, reminded of the Association's past and future in remembering Engelbart. In an obituary Gary Marchionini recalls Engelbart, the inventor of the mouse, as the “father of interactive computing” and the inspiration of a generation of information scientists who work in human-computer interaction and related fields to enhance human capabilities. Engelbart was honored by ASIS&T at our 1996 Annual Meeting at which he participated in a panel on the future of the Association (then the American Society for Information Science). Fortunately his remarks were reported in the Bulletin at the time, and we reprint them in this issue, where they still resonate as ASIS&T looks for new paths forward.