Going Viral co-winner of the ASIS&T Information Science Book of the Year Award

For the second year in a row, the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) honored the iSchool by awarding the Best Information Science Book to an iSchool professor.

Associate Professor Karine Nahon and Jeff Hemsley (Ph.D. ’14 and now Assistant Professor Syracuse University) are co-winners for their book Going Viral. The award was shared this year with Robert Glushko’s book, “The Discipline of Organizing.”

In their award-winning book, Nahon and Hemsley explore the nature of virality and suggest that the ubiquitous Internet memes of today, from silly to serious, may indeed make a fair history for tomorrow.

Virality, the authors stress, relies on social interactions and is not new, and not always global. They cite the 1955 arrest of Rosa Parks as an example of virality in how quickly the African-American community of Montgomery, Ala., used phones, hand bills and word of mouth to recruit 40,000 to its boycott of the bus system, before press coverage of the story.

"Writing the book was a wonderful journey, full of learning, discovery and inspiration. It is exciting to learn that the book received the 2014 ASIS&T Information Science Book Award. We are honored to accept this award and join the past recipients who made an impact on the field,” said Nahon.

iSchool Professor Emerita Raya Fidel received the same award last year, for her book Human Information Interaction: An Ecological Approach to Information Behavior.

According to the ASIS&T website, the award is given to “the author of an outstanding book relevant to the information sciences, including all communication activities and information science and technology fields defined in the purpose of ASIS&T. Books are judged on their importance to information science and technology, readability, validity, originality, research significance and scholarship."

About ASIS&T
Since 1937, the Association for Information Science and Technology (ASIS&T) has been the association for information professionals leading the search for new and better theories, techniques, and technologies to improve access to information.