[Asis-l] New Issue of Information Research

[Prof. Tom Wilson]

A new issue is now on the site at http://InformationR.net/ir/ - here's an
extract from the Editorial:

This issue

As I may have intimated already, this is a rather complex issue. The first set
of papers is from the School of Information Management, Victoria University
Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand, and Alastair G. Smith has an issue
editorial that tells you all about that. I visited the School a few year ago
when it had just been created out of three separate departments and it is good
to see things coming together.

The next two papers are those remaining from the DigLib 2003 conference: Brinley
Franklin and Terry Plum explore "Library usage patterns in the electronic
information environment" in a major survey of electronic information use,
involving 15,000 users. The authors discover use of electronic sources shifting
from in-library to remote use. No doubt that phenomenon is going to increase
rapidly.

Once again, let me remind organizers of conferences in 2005 who are looking for
an open source outlet for the papers are invited to contact me.

Annaïg Mahé, of the Ecole Nationale des Sciences de l'Information et des
Bibliothèques, uses the concept of "information activity analysis" to explore
the use of electronic journals. "Three main information activity types are
outlined—marginal, parallel, and integrated. Each of these types corresponds to
a particular attitude towards scientific information and to different levels of
electronic journal use."

I had forgotten that I had also suggested this issue for papers from the
Luso-Hispanic world, so we also have two papers in Spanish and one in English
from Spain, and another in Spanish from Peru - our first from that country. The
papers represent a very similar range of interests to those from other parts of
the world: two deal with bibliometric approaches to the analysis of scientific
output; one with digital resources; and one with censorship and pornography in
the age of the Internet.

These papers appear with another five refereed papers which deal with the same
common themes: information seeking behaviour, digital libraries, search
engines, and, the odd one out, but still relevant to the journal, the impact of
technology spending on student achievement.

The papers show that Information Research deserves the 'international' tag: we
have, in this issue, papers from Finland (1), France (1), Germany (1), Israel
(1), New Zealand (5), Peru (1), Spain (3), the UK (1) and the USA (2).

___________________________________________________
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/
___________________________________________________