Candidate for Director of Membership Services
Rong Tang
Candidate's Statement: It is a true honor to be nominated for the ALISE Director of Member Services. I appreciate the opportunity to contribute to an association which I value profoundly and consider it home. 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. Meanwhile, on multiple occasions, I represented my School to interview faculty candidates at ALISE. ALISE job placement center had been very frequently used by my colleagues and I in our effort of recruiting new faculty members. In recent years, a good number of Simmons SLIS doctoral students participated in ALISE and presented at the conference or the doctoral poster session. They shared with me how useful the resume review and the doctoral poster program were to them. I recognize greatly the value of this kind of programming targeted at doctoral students, an important membership group of ALISE. As a person who has benefited a great deal from being a member of the Association, I believe what makes ALISE amazing is its outstanding members and the community that the members build. As the Director of Member Services I would devote my time and passion to fulfill relevant responsibilities, look aggressively for innovative ways to recruit new members and retain continuing members, and contribute as much as I can to the success of the Association. I believe much can be done to enhance the service to existing members so that they can see the ongoing value of the Association and remain as an active life-long member. I also view that there are great potentials in growing international ALISE membership both at the institutional and personal levels.
Rong Tang is an associate professor at the School of Library and Information Science, Simmons College. She is the Director of the Usability Lab at Simmons, and the Chair of the Committee on Doctoral Studies. She have been an ALISE member since 1999. Rong served on “ALISE Research Grant Competition” Committee for three years and was the Chair of the Committee in 2010. She served on the ASIS&T Membership Committee from 2010 to 2012 when she organized or helped to organize the New Members Brunch for two years. Rong was the Chair of ASIS&T SIG-USE Chair in 2013-2014. Her 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, she teaches primarily in areas of usability, digital information searching, evaluation of information services, and research methods. She was a visiting professor at National Taiwan University and Jiangsu University in Fall 2013 and Summer 2014, where she taught usability and user behavior research courses. |
