In 1969, the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) established a Best Information Science Book Award to honor selected books with national recognition. This national award is given at the Awards Luncheon held at the ASIS&T Annual Meeting. “The ASIS&T awards represent the greatest recognition and respect professionals may afford their colleagues.”
During the 2015 conference, held this year in St. Louis, Missouri, ILS Associate Professor, Dr. Ronald E. Day was recognized with this award for his book:
Indexing It All: The Subject in the Age of Documentation, Information, and Data (History and Foundations of Information Science Series) – MIT Press 2014.
Excerpts from the Book Overview:
In this book, Ronald Day offers a critical history of the modern tradition of documentation. Focusing on the documentary index (understood as a mode of social positioning), and drawing on the work of the French documentalist Suzanne Briet, Day explores the understanding and uses of indexicality. He examines the transition as indexes went from being explicit professional structures that mediated users and documents to being implicit infrastructural devices used in everyday information and communication acts. Doing so, he also traces three epistemic eras in the representation of individuals and groups, first in the forms of documents, then information, then data… Day considers the status of critique and judgment at a time when people and their rights of judgment are increasingly mediated, displaced, and replaced by modern documentary techniques.
Congratulations Dr. Day!