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LIS-BAILER subscribers may be interested to know about my new book on educational informatics: Web-Based Learning through Educational Informatics: Information Science Meets Educational Computing. Nigel Ford, Department of Information Studies, University of Sheffield. ISBN: 978-1-59904-741-6. IGI Global. 406 pages. April 2008. Here’s a brief summary I hope you may find useful. The book presents developments in “educational informatics”, which represents the fusion of key concepts from library/information science, education and computing. The book seeks to offer a rigorous definition of educational informatics (differentiating it, for example, from educational technology by highlighting library/information aspects), and goes on to develop a new integrated conceptual framework for this field. For long, computer-based learning systems have provided sophisticated pedagogical mediation to complex learning content. But the need for this content to be carefully pre-structured by educators has meant that it has been relatively narrow and limited. By comparison, library/information science has enabled information seekers autonomously to explore a vaster and much less structured world of knowledge – but with the concomitant inability to provide pedagogical mediation. Educational informatics attempts to combine the best of both worlds by enabling pedagogically mediated access to the vast information universe available via the Web, fusing standards and techniques relating to metadata, ontologies and semantic web-based reasoning approaches. Educational informatics represents the intersection of library/information science, education and computing, extending each by injecting key concepts, techniques and approaches from the others. This book provides an integrated view, presenting a thorough foundation of key concepts before going on to introduce leading edge educational informatics systems, and critically to discuss key conceptual, pedagogical and methodological issues. The book is written for students, teachers and researchers in information science, and is designed to be accessible to the non-computer specialist. It is clearly illustrated, with 120 figures and 32 tables. For more details (table of contents, exerpts, etc.) please see: http://igi-global.com/books/details.asp?id=7643