November 12, 2002 – After journeying as far away as Canada for the annual Connections Conference, Maureen Mackenzie, a doctoral student at the Palmer School of Library and Information Science at Long Island University, wanted to bring it closer to home. So she started campaigning at the 2000 conference at the University of Tennessee to bring it to her own campus. On June 6-8, 2003, she will get her wish as the three-day conference comes to the C.W. Post Campus of Long Isand University in Brookville, NY.

For the past seven years, the annual Connections Conference has provided library and information science doctoral students a forum for research presentation in front of fellow graduate students from the U.S. and Canada. "It gives us a comfortable arena in which we can practice presenting our ideas and research results," said Mackenzie, who has attended the conference four times in the past. "I started presenting my research at Connections and the experience helped push me forward and gave me the confidence to present at larger conferences."

Another unique feature of the Connections Conference is that the event is planned and managed exclusively by the students. Mackenzie, organizer of the 2003 conference, is working with a dedicated and talented committee of 11 doctoral students who will manage the lengthy list of details associated with hosting an international conference.

Connections 8: Quest for Knowledge is soliciting papers on doctoral research at any stage of completion for the conference. Submissions will be accepted through February 1, 2003. All doctoral students currently enrolled in library and information science or related fields may submit proposals. The organizers expect to schedule 30-40 presentations. Topics may include abstracting and indexing; archival theory and practice; history of publishing; information management; Internet and multimedia; management of information organizations; media and communications studies; and museum studies. Abstracts accepted for presentation will be posted on the Connections 8 Website and published in a future issue of The Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science.

"This conference is a wonderful opportunity for doctoral students to socialize and integrate themselves into the research community," said Michael Koenig, dean of the College of Information and Computer Science and the Palmer School of Library and Information Science. "Having the conference here at the Palmer School not only makes it available this academic year to all of our doctoral students, in what is now one of the largest programs of its type in the country, it also will have the very beneficial long term effect of getting more of our students into the pattern of participating in future years."

Past U.S. hosts of this conference are the University of Michigan and the University of Tennessee in Knoxville. Conference sessions will be held on the C.W. Post Campus at the Palmer School of Library and Information Science (third floor of the B. Davis Schwartz Memorial Library) and Humanities Hall. The registration fee for the event is $40 for doctoral students and includes the Friday evening reception, continental breakfast and lunch on Saturday and Sunday and the banquet dinner on Saturday evening. (Overnight accommodations additional.) For more information on the Conference, see http://connections2003.liu.edu/ or email connections2003@openlib.org.