[Asis-l] New issue of Information Research

[Tom Wilson]

The April issue of Information Research is now available.  Here is the
Editorial:

Introduction

It has been unusually fraught to get this issue out; the preparation
process was interrupted at a crucial point by my visit to Japan,
followed by a working trip to Dublin, and by delays in getting
contributions into proper shape. As a result, the Abstracts in Spanish
have been unavoidably delayed, and there may be more than one small
glitch in the issue. My apologies to all.

Further changes in the Editorial Board

This quarter we say 'Goodbye' to Dr. Steve Robertson, who,
unfortunately, has had to resign from the Editorial Board for personal
reasons. Steve is well known in the information retrieval world and
his expertise will be missed. I also hope to welcome a colleague from
Japan to the Board in the near future, but we haven't actually tied up
the details as we go to 'press'.

This issue

We present a diverse set of papers in this issue, both topically and
in terms of the geographical distribution of the authors. We have
papers from Portugal, Iran, the USA and Spain - it's curious how few
submissions we get from the UK to the journal. There aren't so many
quality journals in the field that are published in the UK, so the
lack of output may have more to do with the state of research in the
field than with anything else. The demise of the British Library
Research and Development Department, some years ago, certainly seems
to have reduced the opportunities for gaining research funds. The
tranche of money available from the Arts and Humanities Research Board
is also open to bids from other disciplines and the competition is
high, so it is probable that the overall value of funds entering the
field has reduced. Perhaps someone out there would like to submit a
paper on the subject!

The papers themselves are a diverse lot: Zita Correia presents a
'stakeholder model' of the public-sector information system, noting
that the key problem is how to engage stakeholders' commitment to the
public-sector information system. She argues that:

    Societies with high levels of social capital, where positive
relations exist between the state and society, will probably need
little more than exhortation and the incentive of best practice
dissemination, or the adoption of codes of conduct. But societies with
low levels of social capital, where negative relations exist between
the state and society, will need not only to adopt codes of conduct
but also directives, and possibly legal entrenchment of stakeholder
rights and duties.

The paper from Iran is by Gholamreza Pezeshki-Rad and Naser Zamani of
Tarbiat Modares University in Teheran and deals with the
information-seeking behaviour of Iranian agricultural extension
managers and specialists. Agricultural extension is one of those
information-intensive areas of work that has been subject to a fair
amount of research over the years, but often by researchers from the
field of agriculture itself (as is the case here) rather than by
information science researchers. Many years ago, I was involved in a
UNESCO mission to Tunisia to prepare guidelines for the conduct of a
'user needs' survey of extension workers in that country. The work was
never actually undertaken, largely, I think, because of political
apathy in the agency, but it gave me an insight into the enormous
opportunity for information service delivery in this context.

A complete change of pace is provided by Vaagen and Koehler, in their
paper on ethical aspects of the DeCSS decryptation program. DeCSS was
developed by a young Norwegian programmer, known as 'DVD-Jon', who
earned the ire of the American movie industry by producing a program
that would decrypt digital movie files. Court cases resulted, but,
eventually, DVD-Jon was acquitted, the court ruling that it was not
his intention that the program should be used for piracy. The question
the authors raise in this paper relates to the ethics of the
situation: freedom of expression versus intellectual property rights.
They conclude:

    '...there is a growing recognition that there may be access rights
that supersede property rights. It remains to be seen to what extent
this growing recognition in a globalized economy will affect copyright
holder rights'.

Our contribution from Spain is in Spanish and deals with the
development of systematic strategies for Web searching. Given the
diverse range of sources available on the Web, ensuring
comprehensiveness in the search is extremely difficult. The authors
develop a decision-making model for the search and exemplify its use
in the field of the psychology of health.

Next, we have Harry Bruce's paper on 'personal, anticipated
information need', which is related to the habits we have of retaining
and storing (or bookmarking) information sources that we think may be
of relevance to us in the future. Personally, I gave up doing that a
long, long time ago, when I realised that my chances of accurately
predicting future need were pretty close to zero, and that my personal
information management practices would not exactly aid retrieval. I
now assume that, if something catches my attention as of possible
future use, I'll be able to find it again. However, that 'personal,
anticipated information need' exists and that it drives our
squirrel-like behaviour, cannot be denied and Bruce's exposition of
the concept is very welcome.

In addition, there is the usual clutch of book reviews, and on this
occasion I'd like to draw attention to a couple that have very good
things to say about the books concerned. One is a review of Lee
Komito's, The information revolution and Ireland, which, as the
reviewer says, is applicable to many more countries than Ireland; and
the other is my own review of John Buschman's, Dismantling the public
sphere. Situating and sustaining librarianship in the age of the new
public philosophy, which says a number of things that have needed
saying for some time, about the pernicious effect of the market-driven
society on libraries in general. I recommend both books strongly.

Frank Miller

Readers who enjoyed Frank Miller's 'I=0' will be saddened to learn of
his death on Wednesday 23rd February, at his home in Brisbane,
Australia, following a long battle against cancer. Frank's
contributions to the discussion list and the Weblog will be remembered
for their wit and good sense.
Acknowledgments

My thanks, again, to Rae Ann Hughes, volunteer proof reader, for an
excellent job, and to Jose Vicente Rodriquez and Pedro Diaz for coping
with translating the abstracts into Spanish at unusually short notice,
as well as to all those who have acted as referees for this and other
issues.

Professor Tom Wilson, Publisher/Editor-in-Chief

http://InformationR.net/ir/
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________________________________________
Professor Tom Wilson, PhD
Publisher and Editor-in-Chief
Information Research: an international electronic journal
Website: http://InformationR.net/
E-mail: wilsontd at gmail.com
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