We are proud to announce that the 17th BOBCATSSS symposium will take place in Porto, Portugal between 28-30 January 2009.

Contributions are welcome in the form of workshops, paper or poster presentations. The main theme is "Challenges for the New Information Professional" and the seven sub themes are listed below in the call for papers announcement. The target group of the symposium is students, and we are especially inviting papers, posters, and workshop contributions by students or teams of students and teachers.

The time to submit abstracts extends to the 15th of July 2008. The abstracts will be reviewed shortly after the deadline, and we will contact the applicants by the end of August.

We kindly ask you to use our specific template for the abstract. Detailed instructions are provided within the template. Submissions must be entered through the OpenConf system which can be reached via our website http://www.bobcatsss2009.org. Further information on the symposium is also provided on the site.

We are looking forward to receiving your contributions and seeing you in Porto!

The field of information science is constantly changing. New technology and innovations, such as electronic materials in libraries and archives, impel job descriptions to be rewritten. They also challenge the old ways of thinking and working. Changes in materials, the rapid increase in the use of web environments, as well as the ever increasing pace of work require information professionals to give thought to the identity of the profession and their own sense of identity alike. The amount of information is growing exponentially.

The BOBCATSSS 2009 symposium explores the following questions: How to help the users identify good information from all the spam? How to keep the databases running and all the data available to the users in all situations? And what about the physical material? Is there any use for books and paper documents anymore? Information science has many points of interest within other disciplines such as communications theory, computer science and data processing, history, and sociology. What kind of collaboration do information scientists currently have with scholars from other fields, and how to improve it? What is Librarian 2.0?

Subthemes:

* Interdisciplinarity of Information Science
* Information Professional and Information Management
* The current impact of the new technologies in the life of the Information Professional
* The rise and fall of physical libraries and archives
* Information Literacy
* eLibraries & eArchives
* Librarian 2.0

Important Dates

* 15 July 2008: Mandatory abstracts due for full research papers, posters, and workshop contributions
* 1 September 2008: Notification of acceptance
* 30 October 2008: Final version of full research papers due
* 3 November 2008: Registration starts
* 28-30 January 2009: Conference in Porto