0100,0100,0100The July 2000 issue of Information Research is now available at:
http://www.shef.ac.uk/~is/publications/infres/ircont.html
Here is the Editorial:
Times New RomanInformation Research has been selected as a 'key resource' by
the Links2Go site. Links2Go reports as follows:
"The Links2Go Key Resource award differs from other awards in
twoimportant ways. First, it is objective. Most awards rely on
hand selection by one or more "experts," many of whom have only
looked at tens or hundreds of thousands of pages in bestowing
their awards. Selection for these awards means no more than that
one person, somewhere, noticed your page and liked it enough to
select it. The Key Resource award, on the other hand, is based
on an analysis of millions of web pages. Any group or
organization who conducts a similar analysis will arrive at
similar conclusions. When Links2Go says your page is a Key
Resource, we mean that your page is one of the most relevant
pages related to a particular topic on the web today, using an
objective statistical measure applied to an extremely large data
set."
"Second, the Key Resource award is exclusive. We get literally
hundreds of people requesting that their page be added to one or
more topics per week. All of these requests are denied. The only
way to get listed as a Key Resource is to achieve enough
popularity for our analysis to select your pages automatically.
We do not accept fees, offers of link exchanges, free
advertising, or bartered livestock as inducements to add new
sites to our lists. Fewer than one page in one thousand will
ever be selected as a Key Resource."
In other words this is strong confirmation of the status that
the journal has now attained in the field. The Links2Go button
now appears on the top page for the journal.
Now my usual Call for Papers for the next issue of the journal,
which will be Volume 6 Number 1. That issue will appear in
October and will be devoted mainly to a special issue on Web
research, edited by Dr. Amanda Spink of Pennsylvania State
University. However, other papers (refereed or working) are also
welcome and should be sent to our Regional Editors or to myself,
following the
{HYPERLINK "http://www.shef.ac.uk/uni/academic/I-M/is/publication
s/infres/author1.html"}0000,0000,FF00Instructions to Authors0100,0100,0100.
There are four refereed papers in this issue – on diverse
topics, which also illustrate the international character of
Information Research: we have papers from Australia, Lithuania,
Ireland and the USA. The first, Information seeking by blind and
sight impaired citizens: an ecological study, by Kirsty
Williamson, Don Schauder and Amanda Bow, reports a study which
investigated information seeking by sight impaired people, with
particular emphasis on the role of the Internet. The authors
note that:
left"Information needs were found to be much the same as for older
adults, as indicated in a number of different studies.
Information sources were also shown to be similar to those used
by older people, with the exception that there was considerable
use of organisations for the blind and sight impaired,
especially by those who were living alone. Contextual factors,
both personal and societal, were found to be particularly
significant in relation to the use of various sources of
information, including the Internet."
The second paper, by Dr. Marius Povilas Saulauskas of Vilnius
University, Lithuania, is, The spell of HOMO IRRETITUS: amidst
superstitions and dreams, is a change from our usual papers in
that it is an 'opinion piece' - a thought-provoking examination
of the idea of the 'information society' and the place of
'netted man' (homo irretitus) in that society. Please let both
the author and myself have feedback on this paper.
In the third paper Frederic Adam and Brian Fitzgerald of
University College Cork debate the "status of the information
systems field" and highlight some of the fundamental choices
facing IS researchers. They conclude that:
leftThe point is to determine how far the IS field has gone in
comparison with other fields in the social sciences and whether
it has reached the stage of its history when the nature of
research in IS can shift orientation towards more attention to
the long term establishment of an intellectual core and stronger
identity.
The final refereed paper is Information exchange in virtual
communities: a typology, by Gary Burnett of Florida State
University. The aim of the typology is to "provide a mechanism
for assessing the characteristics of virtual communities in
terms of their support for information exchange" and to "enhance
our understanding of virtual communities as information
environments."
This issue also has two Working Papers – the first reports on an
ethnographic investigation into an attempt at innovation in the
field of information management in a less-developed country in
East Africa, while the second is a report on the present status
and future prospects of Schools Library Services in the UK.
For this issue I have left the links to the electronic
dissertations on the Contents page. This feature has attracted a
great deal of interest from around the world and I hope to have
links to electronic dissertations in other places before long.
The demand is evidently high: the home page for the electronic
dissertations 'library' has received about 700 hits since
January and two of the three dissertations have had more than
800 hits. The third dissertation lacked a counter until
recently, through a production oversight, and, consequently,
shows a much lower number of hits.
We now have more than 1000 registered readers from all over the
world and this, perhaps, is a better indicator of readership
than hits, although the fact that readers do not have to
register suggests that there may be many regular readers who do
not bother to register.
In April 2001 Professor Charles Oppenheim will produce an issue
on intellectual property in the digital age. We also have plans
for another special issue - possibly for January 2001 - on
knowledge representation and ontology. More on that in a future
e-mail message to our 'registered readers'.
Note also that we now have an international
{HYPERLINK "http://www.shef.ac.uk/~is/publications/infres/EdBoard
.html"}0000,0000,FF00Editorial Board0100,0100,0100 and if one of the people on the Board is
close to you, contact him or her about submitting a paper. We
are willing, of course, to consider papers from anywhere in the
world, not simply those from the regions indicated. I act as
General Editor and will accept submissions from Western Europe,
the Middle and Far East, and Australasia.
Professor Tom Wilson, Ph.D.
Research Professor in Information Management
Department of Information Studies
University of Sheffield, Sheffield S10 2TN, UK
Tel: +44-114-222-2642
Fax: +44-114-278-0300
e-mail: [log in to unmask]
http://www.shef.ac.uk/~is/wilson/
*************************************************
Wisdom is one of the few things that looks bigger the further away it is.
>From an Alt-Fan-Pratchett posting
**********************************************************
%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%%