[Asis-l] TOC JASIST, Volume 53, Number 10

[Richard Hill]

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology
JASIST
VOLUME 53, NUMBER 10

[Note: URLs for viewing contents of JASIST from past issues are at the 
bottom.  Immediately below, the contents of Bert Boyce's "In This Issue" 
and part of Andrew Dillon's introduction to the special issue on 
Information Architecture has been cut into the Table of Contents.]

  EDITORIAL

  In This Issue
  Bert R. Boyce
  781

  RESEARCH
  Relevance of Web Documents: Ghosts Consensus Method
  Andrey L. Gorbunov
  Published online 6 June 2002
  783
     In this issue we begin we will discuss three papers not covered by the 
editor of the special topics section. In the first, Gorbunov suggests a 
method of refining results achieved from a vector space model search. After 
the cosine measure is computed as a relevance function and the documents 
ranked, searcher preferences are solicited as to the importance of author 
and searcher ideas conforming, the importance of searcher concurrence with 
majority users, the importance of little known documents, and the 
importance of topical closeness. These are used to form assertions about 
seven criteria of relevance: in document frequency, number of links, 
presence of terms in metadata, presence in the title, presence in special 
zones of the document, distance between searched for words in the document, 
and evenness of the distribution of searched for words. These assertions 
may be expressed as constraint conditions to produce an objective function 
to re-rank the documents, thus providing a ranking more reflective of the 
searcher's needs than majority opinion based on links or citations.

  Duality Revisited: Construction of Fractional Frequency Distributions 
Based on Two Dual Lotka Laws
  L. Egghe and I.K. Ravichandra Rao
  Published online 11 June 2002
  789
    Egghe and Rao are able to present evidence that frequency distributions 
of author productivity, where productivity is fractionally assigned from 
multiple author papers, are a consequence of Lotka's law rather than 
exceptions to it. Occurrences of fractional scores will be influenced by 
low frequency of papers with a higher number of authors, and the higher 
frequency of papers with a low number of authors, while multiple 
combinations of papers with different numbers of authors can produce the 
same score. Calculation of the fractional frequency distribution is very 
difficult since any positive rational number is a possible frequency and 
the shapes of simulated and of empirically derived fractional distributions 
have been shown to be quite irregular. By grouping data and allowing for 
only a limited number of fractional scores, an analytical formula is 
produced for the probability of each allowed score, which nicely fits the 
grouped empirical data.

  The Impact of the Internet on Public Library Use: An Analysis of the 
Current Consumer Market for Library and Internet Services
  George D'Elia, Corinne Jorgensen, Joseph Woelfel, and Eleanor Jo Rodger
  Published online 30 May 2002
  802
    D'Elia et alia, segment their population of study into six segments: 
those who use the library, have access to the Internet and use the 
Internet; those who use the library, have access to the Internet and do not 
use the Internet, those who use the library, and do not have access to the 
Internet; those who do not use the library, have access to the Internet and 
use the Internet, those who do not use the library, have access to the 
Internet and do not use the Internet; and those who do not use the library, 
and have no access to the Internet. A random telephone survey used 
screening questions that allowed this segmentation of the sample. A 
questionnaire was developed using focus groups of members of the segments, 
and previous questionnaires, and was tested in a series of three pilot 
surveys. The questions varied depending upon the segment identified for 
each sample call of the 3,097 made.
    Internet access at home was available to 47%, and at the library 37.5%, 
while only 4.3% had access only at home and 0.5% only at the library. The 
Internet is used by 53.2% and both library and Internet are used by 40%. 
Seventy-five percent of Internet users also use the library and 60% of 
library users use the Internet. Use of both media is inversely related to 
age, and directly related to educational attainment and household income. 
More males than females use the Internet and more females than males use 
the library. The ranked order of rating of service characteristics of the 
library was significantly and inversely related to the ranked order of the 
service characteristics of the Internet, and the Internet was rated 
superior to the library in 10 of 16 service characteristics. Library 
non-use is attributed to lack of time, and a preference for owning and 
retaining materials.

  SPECIAL TOPIC ISSUE: INFORMATION ARCHITECTURE
  Guest Editor: Andrew Dillon

  Information Architecture in JASIST: Just Where Did We Come From?
  Andrew Dillon
  Published online 17 May 2002
  821
In the present issue is a collection of articles representing a spectrum of 
perspectives from academics and practitioners, practical and theoretical, 
all offering one angle on issues collected under the label information 
architecture. In it you will find considerations (not definitive 
statements) of important contemporary issues that are being shaped even as 
we think, from
curricular (Latham) to method (Large et al.); from conception (Haverty) to 
case (Hauck and Weisband); from theory (Toms) to practice (Burke); with 
data (Cunliffe) and speculation (Rosenfeld). Even this carving up is 
partial, because several articles cross several of these divides.
         The articles are not the definitive word on IA; it would be 
impossible to expect any collection to be such given the dynamism of the 
field. But these articles do offer a valuable snapshot. This is IA as seen 
by a variety of thinkers in the early 21st century. No doubt all will think 
again about these issues and evolve a more refined perspective, but these 
articles do represent, in current parlance, a sense of Big IA and what the 
field covers. Drawing in people from outside the normal community of ASIST 
conference or IA summit attendees, I believe these articles represent a 
landmark effort, and there is no doubt in my mind that IA represents an 
exciting and important mix of ideas and perspectives that can serve to 
bridge traditional divisions in the information studies disciplines. 
Regardless of how the field eventually becomes labeled, the issues IA has 
brought into relief must be addressed, and in so doing, such addressing 
will help shape the future of information science. Predicting the future is 
a thankless task, but the opportunity to stand still and survive as a 
practitioner or theoretician has passed - the information domain will be as 
much the province of architecture as the physical world, and those that 
will shape the new spaces will impact humankind on a level that will prove 
beyond the reach of physical architecture. This is only the beginning - get 
involved.

  Information Architecture: Notes Toward a New Curriculum
  Don Latham
  Published online 30 May 2002
  824

  Information Architecture for the Web: The IA Matrix Approach to Designing 
Children's Portals
  Andrew Large, Jamshid Beheshti, and Charles Cole
  Published online 20 May 2002
  831

  Information Architecture Without Internal Theory: An Inductive Design 
Process
  Marsha Haverty
  Published online 17 May 2002

  839

  When a Better Interface and Easy Navigation Aren't Enough: Examining the 
Information Architecture in a Law Enforcement Agency
  Roslin V. Hauck and Suzanne Weisband
  Published online 14 May 2002
  846

  Information Interaction: Providing a Framework for Information Architecture
  Elaine G. Toms
  Published online 14 May 2002
  855

  Designing a New Urban Internet
  Lauren Burke
  Published online 11 June 2002
  863

  Information Architecture for Bilingual Web Sites
  Daniel Cunliffe, Helen Jones, Melanie Jarvis, Kevin Egan, Rhian Huws, and 
Sian Munro
  Published online 9 May 2002
  866

  Information Architecture: Looking Ahead
  Louis Rosenfeld
  Published online 11 June 2002
  874

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<http://www.asis.org/Publications/JASIS/tocs.html> contains the Table of 
Contents and abstracts from Bert Boyce's "In This Issue" from January 1993 
(Volume 44) to date.

The John Wiley Interscience site <http://www.interscience.wiley.com> 
includes issues from 1986 (Volume 37) to date.  Guests have access only to 
tables of contents and abstracts.  Registered users of the interscience 
site have access to the full text of these issues and to preprints.]


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