[Asis-l] New Issue of Information Research

[Tom Wilson]

Volume 11 No. 4, which includes the first batch of papers from the
ISIC Conference, which opens on 19th July in Sydney, is now online.

http://Informationr.net/ir/index.html

Here's the editorial, to whet your appetite:

Introduction
As this issue goes online, the ISIC Conference is taking place in
Sydney, Australia: sadly, I'm not able to attend this year, the first
time I have missed since the series began. I wish all the participants
a very successful meeting - and I hope the weather improves before the
end of the week. While England swelters in a heat wave, Sydney is in
the middle of a cold, wet winter!

In this issue
With the ISIC conference going on, we have the first batch of papers
in this issue—the remaining papers will be published in the October
2006 and January 2007 issues. I haven't grouped the papers in any way,
they are simply listed in the order in which they came to hand and
were prepared for publication. At this stage, I still have one or two
amendments to come from some authors, but these are minor points and
the texts of the papers have been fully reviewed and edited. As usual
with ISIC, the papers went through the same review process as ordinary
journal papers and authors were told that the standards applied by
peer-reviewed journals would be used by the referees.

I shan't go through each of the papers to say what they are about, but
Diane Sonnenwald's paper is somewhat out of the ordinary for ISIC
dealing as it does with information behaviour in military command and
control. There are so many papers in this area that deal with the
'captive' audiences of schoolchildren, university students and
academics, that it is refreshing to have the occasional paper about a
different kind of information user group and different information
use.

In addition to the ISIC papers we have four other peer-reviewed papers
on quite diverse topics. One could well have been an ISIC conference
papers: Scholarly use of information: graduate students' information
seeking behaviour by Carole George and her colleagues at Carnegie
Mellon University, Pittsburgh. This deals with a fairly common topic,
but comes from a group of practising librarians, which makes a nice
change.

Weideman and Schwenke have explored the extent to which pages linked
to by JavaScript™ links are accessible to search engines and conclude
that search engine 'crawlers', in general, do not bother to follow
such links. This probably has most significance for e-commerce sites
and suggests that links of this kind are best avoided.

Baeza-Yates and Pino, present a model for the evaluation of software
for CSCW projects, which they illustrate by reference to collaborative
information retrieval: they draw attention to the shortcomings of the
model, which they intend to develop further.

Finally, an apology to Kristin Eschenfelder and her colleagues: their
paper on the ethics of DeCSS ought to have found its way into an
earlier issue, but, for one reason or another, was overlooked. The
paper could usefully be read in association with that by Vaagan and
Koehler.

Endnote
As usual, we can claim an international character; the geographical
distribution of papers is: Australia - 2; Canada - 1; Chile - 1;
Finland - 1; Israel - 1; South Africa - 1; Sweden - 1; UK - 1; and USA
- 5. I shall check the remaining issues in this volume and show what
the distribution is in a message to the Weblog



-- 

Professor Tom Wilson, PhD, Hon.Ph.D.,
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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