[Asis-l] New issue of Information Research

[Prof. Tom Wilson]

Volume 9 No. 3 of Information Research is now availabe at
http://InformationR.net/ir/

Apologies for multiple postings, if you are a 'registered reader'. If you think
you ARE a registered reader but have not received previous notification of the
issue, it probably means that you have changed your e-mail address. Go to the
registration page to re-register.

Here is the Editorial


Introduction

Although I find it difficult to keep count of submissions on a day by day basis,
I have the impression that the journal is attracting more. Our readership base
also continues to grow, with almost 3,000 registered users. I imagine there
would be at least 10,000 if the system was set up to require registration and
password use for access. In other words, we seem to have a successful journal
here and it is rather surprising to me that, following my efforts to secure the
future of the journal, only two universities appear to be seriously interested
in taking on the journal. A publisher is also interested and would probably
make the journal open access to non-institutional IP addresses (that is, anyone
accessing from a home computer would continue to use the journal freely, while
institutions would pay) and to institutions in certain countries in the
developing world and Central and Eastern Europe.

So - let me open a debate on this: how concerned would you be if Information
Research was to become only partly open access? And, if you are seriously
concerned, are you prepared to persuade your institution to contribute to its
survival? I do not keep detailed accounts of the time I spend on the journal
and what I do could be split over at least three persons, but, as a ball-park
figure, it would probably cost an organization about £8,000 a year to reproduce
what I do - unless, of course, people are prepared to do as I do and take it on
as a voluntary task. It would probably help the cause of open access publishing
if institutions rewarded staff for this role in the scholarly communication
process in the same way as they reward research outputs. After all, the role is
no less important.

You can communicate with me directly on this or send a message to the Weblog.
This issue

Part of this issue is taken up with papers representing research being carried
out at the Information Management Research Institute at Northumbria University
in the UK. As usual, it has an Issue Editorial, so I shall say no more

We also two more papers from the Digital Libraries conference in Espoo, Finland,
which contributed papers to the previous issue. The first, from Hyldegaard and
Seiden at the Royal School, Copenhagen explores the usefulness of a personal
portal to access scholarly articles - this, of course, is a modern variant of
the old 'selective dissemination of information' strategy and, not surprisingly
suffers from at least one of the same problems, that is, persuading the user to
develop an effective profile and to maintain it. This second, by Mark Notess,
deals with a digital library of a rather different kind, dealing as it does,
with music. The paper is of general interest, however, because it deals with
the methods used to identify users' needs. Three methods were employed:
contextual design, log file analysis, and questionnaires. The author concludes,
""...all three methods can be fruitfully combined to provide a more holistic
picture of use."

Once again, let me remind organizers of conferences in 2004 who are looking for
an open source outlet for the papers are invited to contact me.

Finally, there are two more refereed papers - it's interesting that the
submission of Working Papers has declined to the point at which it may be
unnecessary to have that option; perhaps now that the journal has found its
place in the citation indexes, people are more prepared to put the effort into
preparing an acceptable paper.

Terrence A. Brooks presents an interesting view of the impact of the Google
search engine in the creation of what he calls a culture of 'lay indexing'.
That is, a situation in which what is retrieved depends not upon original
indexing - indeed, Google and other search engines ignore the meta-tags that
convey such indexing - but upon its PageRank algorithm:

    If a large number of Web users in the role of authors create content that
points at certain Web pages, then it is highly probable that those same Web
pages presented as query results will satisfy a large number of Web users in
the role of searchers. In other words, Google satisfies the average Web
searcher so well because it has aggregated the valuations of the average Web
author. In this way, Google transforms Web authors into lay indexers of Web
content where the linkages they set is a plebiscite for the most "important"
Web pages.

No doubt the competition between Google and Yahoo! and the competition between
these and Microsoft's future search engine will result in more and more ways to
cluster documents in response to a search.

The other paper is also on digital libraries - not, in this case, resulting from
the Espoo conference. It is a multi-authored account of the development of a
digital library for endangered languages, of which there are many. There is, in
fact, a UNESCO Red Book on Endangered Languages. This paper discusses the
problem of endangered languages and presents an

    ...architecture of a distributed digital library for endangered languages
which will contain various data of endangered languages in the forms of text,
image, video, audio and include advanced tools for intelligent cataloguing,
indexing, searching and browsing information on languages and language
analysis.

I hope you all enjoy this new issue and, remember, you can discuss the papers by
registering with the Information Research Weblog .
___________________________________________________
Professor T.D. Wilson, PhD
Publisher/Editor in Chief
Information Research
InformationR.net
University of Sheffield
Sheffield S10 2TN,  UK
e-mail: t.d.wilson at shef.ac.uk
Web site: http://InformationR.net/
___________________________________________________