ASIS&T Annual Meeting 2018 677 Panels What Does the Future Hold for the Information Associations? A Panel with the Presidents of ASIS&T, ALISE, and the Chair of iSchools Consortium Lisa M. Given Swinburne University of Technology, Australia, lgiven@swin.edu.au Heidi Julien University at Buffalo, USA, heidjul@buffalo.edu Sam Oh Sungkyunkwan University, Korea, samoh@skku.edu Saguna Shankar University of British Columbia, Canada, saguna@mail.ubc.ca ABSTRACT This panel will explore how information associations can maintain engagement and relevance at a time when academic disciplines are evolving, when institutional and personal budgets face increasing pressures, and as we strive to connect across a broad global footprint. The panel brings together the leaders of three information science associations – the President of the Association for Information Science and Technology, the President of the Association for Library and Information Science Education, and the Chair of the iSchools’ Consortium – to discuss the issues their associations face currently. KEYWORDS Information science; Collaboration; Professional associations; Education; Futures INTRODUCTION The discipline of Information Science (IS) covers a diverse, interdisciplinary range of research topic areas and professional contexts, all bound together by a shared interest in people and information, in an ever-changing global, digital landscape. Over the years, academics and professionals in IS have tried to identify clear boundaries of where these shared interests begin and end – e.g., on the ways that individuals seek information, on the design of information systems to gather and share knowledge, or on the strategies we use to classify and categorise information – to name just a few. However, as new disciplines have emerged (such as digital humanities, data science, and health informatics), those working within the historic boundaries of IS have struggled to maintain those boundaries. More and more people, professions, and academic disciplines are now working in areas that overlap and complement IS areas of practice and research. Although this presents many opportunities for IS – from collaborative research, to practice that is informed by a broader range of disciplinary contexts – this seeming encroach- ment on traditional IS territory also presents a number of challenges that must be considered and addressed. This panel will explore one of these challenges – how best to maintain engagement and relevance as an information association at a time when academic disciplines, and the information professions, are changing and evolving, globally. Given global pres- sures on institutional and personal budgets, which can reduce membership and conference attendee numbers, the information associations must find ways to connect to a broader range of people, across a larger geographic footprint, and at a time when new organisations and events are competing for individuals’ attention and membership dollars. At the same time, global polit- ical movements (from the rise of ‘fake news’ to the continuing struggles between proprietary vs. open access publishing mod- els) illustrate that the need for strong associations of information specialists has never been so high. The panel will explore how information science practitioners, researchers, and educators may work together closely to collectively address these issues. PANEL OVERVIEW This panel brings together the leaders of three IS associations – the President of the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T), the President of the Association for Library and Information Science Education (ALISE), and the Chair of the iSchools’ Consortium – to discuss the issues their associations face currently. The panel will also explore, through interactive engagement with the audience, the potential strategies that the three associations could embrace to 1) address global information issues, collectively; and, 2) work together to provide complementary supports for academics and professionals engaged in information science.