SIGLINK stepping towards the future

Marc Nanard, SIGLINK Chair

In accordance to ACM SIG bylaws, SIGLINK held elections at the end of last spring. A new team has been elected for the next two years with Marc Nanard as Chair, Elli Mylonas and Franca Garzotto as Vice Chairs, Frank Shipman as Secretary and Uffe Kock Will as treasurer. Walter Vannini is the Newsletter editor. First of all, we want to thank you for trusting us--clearly the alternate slate would also have been excellent choices. Be sure all of us will do our best to make SIGLINK an active and healthy group. We also want to congratulate the previous team which had the heavy task of managing SIGLINK during four years and keeping it active during the lean times where the fund balance was low. The new team has a profound respect for the past chairs Rick Furuta and Robert Akscyn. They will go on playing an important advisory role for SIGLINK. Rick Furuta is now at ACM SIGBoard and continues on the SIGLINK Executive Committee as immediate past chair. Special thanks also to Keith Instone who made the Newsletter really attractive.

In August, Eli Mylonas and I attended the New Officers and the SIG Chairs Meetings in New York. It was the opportunity for us to gain a better understanding of the ACM structure and uses. We met Alisa Rivkin who is our new Program Director and is our main contact at the ACM. Discussing issues directly with other SIGs helps us have a wider view of the ACM community. Like the overall ACM membership, SIGLINK's membership shrunk during the past few years. The development of electronic access to information is one of the major causes, but surely not the only one. We need a deeper analysis of the phenomena to adapt SIGLINK to the evolution of the member's needs and to provide more valuable services to the members. We also need to be actively present in all aspects related to the hypermedia domain and to its applications, especially the Web.

I summarize the guidelines of actions we plan for these two years :

DEMOCRACY:

The first important issue for us is to make SIGLINK YOUR group and to make YOU participate much more to SIGLINK's life. SIGLINK is not only concerned with the management of the HT conferences. It also aims to provide an active forum; your forum. It is our will to make you aware of the important issues of SIGLINK's life as soon as possible and to widely discuss them with you. You are invited to provide us with your comments, with information, with suggestions, with remarks.

 

To do so, We will use the ACM membership email lists to directly email you important information and we have created a SIGLINK email address where members can send us messages.

 

The address is acm-siglink@lirmm.fr

 

EXCELLENCE:

As a part of the ACM, SIGLINK needs first to assert the scientific excellence of the works and publications it supports. Its future relies on the high ranking of its conferences, of its awards, of its newsletter, of its Web site, in a word of its visibility. The ranking of HT conferences has always been very high. We will do our best to preserve and even increase SIGLINK excellence on every point.

 

Excellence is a notion of quality, not of focus nor of dissertation style. It must be clear it does not mean "only academic" nor "only theoretical". SIGLINK is the proper place for fruitful exchanges between end-users, developers and researchers.

 

SIGLINK is actively working on its conferences. The HT'98 conference, which takes place at Pittsburgh jointly with DL'98, is well on the track. Robert Akscyn and his team are doing a tremendous job of preparing this great event. Elli Mylonas and Kaj Gronbaeck are preparing a wonderful and highly attractive program. But we are also looking forward: Joerg Haake has already started preparing for HT'99 at the GMD in Darmstadt, Germany.

 

Unfortunately some SIGLINK services failed the zero-defect requirement last years: we do apologize for the late delivery of SIGLINK Newsletters issues at the end of 1996 and beginning of 1997 once Keith Instone had to leave us. Walter Vannini, our new Editor, will do his best to make the new issues highly valuable and to, of course, publish them on time.

 

OPENNESS:

Hypertext is just the opposite of a narrowly focused research domain. Hypertext typically is a a wide-open, multi-disciplinary research field, mixing, among others, computer science, psychology, and literary theory. Computer scientists working on the fundamentals of the domain, information retrieval researchers, system designers studying how to implement hypertext systems, authors, writers and designers who are involved in the creation, the design and the production of hypermedia, end-users who are directly concerned with the usability of hypertexts are already explicitly cited in the SIGLINK statement of purpose that appears on the inside cover of each newsletter. But so many other areas are strongly connected to hypertext that it is impossible to list all of them. We must let them know that SIGLINK is widely open to them. Especially Web related research within SIGLINK is not visible enough. We intend to promote this relationship more explicitly.

 

PARTNERSHIP AND COOPERATION:

Many partners are also interested in SIGLINK activities. We do welcome them. Currently SIGLINK is organizing, jointly with SIGIR, two conferences, Hypertext '98 and Digital libraries'98, which are co-located in Pittsburgh, with DL'98 just following HT'98. SIGLINK also cooperated with other SIGs in the Fifth Annual ACM International Multimedia Conference at Seattle (September 97), and in the Sixth International Conference on Information and Knowledge Management at Las Vegas (October 97). Many working groups take advantage of the HT conference to organize workshops under the SIGLINK umbrella: Open hypermedia systems, Hypermedia design, .... Typically SIGLINK is at the crossing of many roads.

 

We need to be active to develop partnerships. An important effort is currently to help the IEEE sponsored ADL Conference ("Advances in Digital Libraries") merge with the ACM DL conference as soon as is possible. Robert Akscyn and Sally E. Howe are actively preparing the merger. It is an important issue on which we are waiting for your comments too.

 

EVOLUTION:

SIGLINK still is a young and very promising SIG. Nevertheless, we need to work together to actively help it evolve to remain in phase with the tremendously fast transformation of hypermedia technologies, especially due to the Web's maturation. The World Wide Web takes an increasingly important part in SIGLINK's activity. From the WWW demo at San Antonio Hypertext'91 conference, sessions about the WWW were organized in SIGLINK conferences. In 1997 the winner of Douglas Engelbart Best Paper Award was Kaj Gronbaeck, who presented his work about WWW (indeed two of the three nominees for the prize were based on WWW technology). The Southampton HT'97 conference had a shared keynote speech and a live session with WWW6. Preparing it relied on a strong cooperation with the WWW6 organizers. Many SIGLINK members present papers both at WWW conferences and at HT conferences. SIGLINK's interest in WWW activities is already important but not sufficient enough. We need to make more explicit SIGLINK's openness to the Web, and to involve WWW workers in our efforts.

 

In this context, an important evolution of SIGLINK is planed for the current year. We describe it in the next section and welcome you to send us comments at acm.siglink@lirmm.fr.

 

NEW DYNAMICS:

SIGLINK must provide you with new services. Many excellent ideas have been proposed, and some are already becoming reality. SIGLINK will improve its publications, adding new topics such as 'Surveys of important issues' in the newsletter, and even develop new publications. We will improve our Web site and develop 'SIGLINK members only' sets of pages on which the whole newsletter and other documents could be on line. The 'SIGLINK only' server could become a rich forum, providing more reason to be a SIGLINK member. We are currenly putting this infrastructure into work, but it is also up to you to keep it active.