Candidate for Director of External Relations

Rong Tang
Associate Professor
Simmons College

Candidate's Statement:
It is a true honor to be nominated for the ALISE Director of External Relations. I appreciate the opportunity to contribute to an association which I value profoundly and consider it home. In addition to administering ALISE social media sites and ensuring timely and relevant content appearing on the ALISE website, the Director of External Relations serves essentially as a liaison both to a number of ALISE committees and to ALISE related associations such as ASIS&T and ALA.

As a LIS educator for over 16 years, I believe in ALISE’s vision and mission. In order to be a global leader and to promote innovation and excellence in LIS education, ALISE needs to not only develop platforms that support, showcase, and share LIS scholarship and pedagogical best practices, but also foster thought experiments on ground-breaking ideas or perspectives, as well as create opportunities for international collaboration and global partnerships that advance and enrich LIS education. In this endeavor, the Director of External Relations plays a major role in connecting various committees with the Board, cultivating relationships with other associations, communicating with ALISE members and beyond, and advocating for academic freedom, diversity and inclusion, open education, and many other important values and principles upheld by the Association.

I became an ALISE member in 1999 when I was a doctoral student. ALISE helped me to get connected with people who were highly esteemed scholars in the field and whose publications I read in my classes. I thought it was the most wonderful organization. Over the years, I have attended “Birds of a Feather” sessions, attended doctoral poster and work-in-progress poster sessions, served as a faculty advisor for resume review, and organized and presented in panels at ALISE Conferences. One of my papers received 2008 Bohdan S. Wynar/ALISE Research Paper Competition award. I received the OCLC/ALISE Library & Information Science Research Grant in 2008. I served on the “ALISE Research Grant Competition” Committee from 2009 to 2011, and was the Chair of the Committee in 2010. Currently I am one of the co-conveners for ALISE International Library Education Special Interest Group. Beyond ALISE, I was the Chair of ASIS&T SIG USE in 2013-2014. I have been serving as a co-Chair for the ASIS&T Publications Committee since 2015. I am the Director for Simmons SLIS Doctoral Program, and have been the Director for Simmons Usability Lab for eight years.

People who have worked with me on a Committee or a SIG will tell you that I am a passionate and dedicated person, and that I work very diligently and effectively. If I am elected to be the Director of External Relations, I will strive to serve and contribute to ALISE, its members, the Board, the committees, and LIS communities to the best of my ability.

Thank you for your consideration.

Biography
I am an associate professor at the School of Library and Information Science (SLIS), Simmons College. I am the Director of the Usability Lab at Simmons, and the Director of the SLIS Doctoral Program. I have been an ALISE member since 1999. I served on “ALISE Research Grant Competition” Committee for three years and was the Chair of the Committee in 2010. Currently I am one of the conveners for ALISE International Library Education Special Interest Group. I served on the ASIS&T Membership Committee from 2010 to 2012 when I organized or helped to organize the New Members Brunch for two years. I was the Chair of ASIS&T SIG-USE Chair in 2013-2014. I have been serving as a Co-Chair of ASIS&T Publications Committee since 2015. My research interests center on user behavior research, including cognitive styles and user experience, usability evaluation, collaborative user behavior, and mobile user research.  Published in top-ranked journals, I teach primarily in areas of usability, digital information searching, evaluation of information services, and research methods. I was a visiting professor at National Taiwan University and Jiangsu University in Fall 2013 and Summer 2014, where I taught usability and user behavior research courses and gave user behavior research talks in multiple universities in China.