Information Seeking in Context (ISIC) Conference University of Technology Sydney, 19-21 July 2006.(Conference news)

For the first time, the Information Seeking in Context (ISIC) Conference was held in Australia. This was the sixth of the ISIC biennial conferences, the first of which was held in Tampere, Finland in 1996. The Sydney ISIC program offered varied and interesting papers. Given the number of papers and the fact that we could not attend all the sessions and tended to be interested in the same speakers, the following provides information about selected papers only on each day of the conference. The full program is available at: http://www.hss.uts.edu.au/isic2006/.

Since ISIC conferences are renowned for a focus on theory, it was not surprising that Day One's keynote speech, titled 'Making User Studies Matter: Thank You Mr Feynman, Monsieur Foucault', was delivered by the foremost theoretical thinker in the field of human information behaviour, Brenda Dervin. As always Dervin was stimulating and provocative. With a musical accompaniment, she introduced the audience to screen photos of a wide range of theorists who have influenced her thinking during her long career. She then focussed on the theorists who emphasise the need to 'surround knowledge with uncertainty'. She argued for researchers 'to ask the right questions rather than provide the right answers' and offered a set of propositions for making user studies matter.

One of the parallel sessions in the morning took up the issue of 'Uncertainty' in a paper…