The new issue of Information Research is now available at
http://InformationR.net/ir/
There may be some glitches in the current issue as things have
been pretty hectic in getting it together.
Here are the details:
A couple of issues ago I remarked on the hazards of journal
publication when promised papers do not materialise. We didn't get
quite to that stage on this occasion, but we did get fairly close to
the wire! My thanks to Ari Pirkola who managed to whip his
colleagues into line to deliver this special issue on cross- lingual IR
research at the University of Tampere, Finland.
The special issue marries two ideas that I have had - one is the
'special issue' concept, which has worked pretty well so far; the
other is the idea of giving space to individual research centres to
present their work (subject to refereeing as usual, of course). I
would be very happy to hear from any research group that would
like to present its work in this way.
We also have refereed papers from three different countries -
Canada, Australia, and Singapore. The first is a follow-up to the
authors' (Joan Cherry and Wendy Duff) earlier paper on the digital
library 'Early Canadiana Online'. The authors suggest that"...that
digital library research should take into account the types of tasks
carried out, as well as the culture, of different user groups." This
conclusion stems from the fact that those who use the site for
teaching and research use it in different ways from other users.
The paper from Australia is in the information systems field: Philip
Dobson examines the reasons for exploring the philosophical basis
of research in the field, and proposes 'critical realism' as the
philosphical school of choice.
Finally, from Singapore, we have a paper on 'task-based design'
applied to a digital work environment for academic work. The
academic work in this instance being that of students preparing
dissertations and academic staff preparing courses. The focus in
this paper is on the student dissertation and the authors note that
this focus, "...highlights the importance of task-based design in
assisting and helping students and instructors from the time of
selecting the research project to the time of submitting the final
bound copies of the dissertation."
I have recently been asked to give blanket approval for the
republication of papers in Information Research on CD-ROM for
users in the continent of Africa - a very desirable idea, which I
would be glad to support. However, I simply provide a channel of
communication for the papers - the authors retain the copyright,
and I cannot arbitrarily agree that their work should be republished
by some other agency in a different medium. I'm afraid that anyone
who wishes to republish one of the papers appearing here must
approach the author.
Once again, here are the most 'popular' papers from recent issues:
Vol. 5 No. 1 - Gender and learning attitudes in using Web-based
science lessons, by Siew Chee Leong and Suliman Al-Hawamdeh,
Nanyang Technological University, Singapore - 3347 hits
Vol. 5 No. 2 - Textual and chemical information processing:
different domains but similar algorithms, by Peter Willett,
Department of Information Studies, University of Sheffield, UK. -
2906 hits
Vol. 5 No. 3 - Recent trends in user studies: action research and
qualitative methods, T.D. Wilson, Department of Information
Studies, University of Sheffield, Sheffield, UK - 6263 hits
Vol. 5 No. 4 - Information exchange in virtual communities: a
typology, by Gary Burnett, Florida State University, Tallahassee,
Florida, USA - 2851 hits
Vol. 6 No. 1 - Designing internet research assignments: building a
framework for instructor collaboration., by David Ward and Sarah
Reisinger, University of Illinois, USA - 6352 hits
Vol. 6 No. 2 - Where is meaning when form is gone? Knowledge
representation on the Web, by Terrence A. Brooks, University of
Washington, Seattle, Washington, USA - 1784 hits
Vol. 6 No. 3 - Determining organizational information needs: the
Critical Success Factors approach, by Maija-Leena Huotari,
University of Tampere, Finland and T.D. Wilson, University of
Sheffield, U.K. - 2142 hits
Vol. 6 No. 4 - Scholarly communication, scholarly publication and
the status of emerging formats, by Leah Halliday, Department of
Information Science, Loughborough University, UK - 595 hits
Vol. 7 No. 1 - Environmental scanning as information seeking and
organizational learning, by Chun Wei Choo, University of Toronto,
Canada - 698 hits
Professor Tom Wilson Publisher/Editor-in-Chief
|