Vol. 11 No. 4, July 2006
| Vol. 11 No. 4, July 2006 | ||||
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!
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.
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, Publisher/Editor-in-Chief |
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How to cite this editorial:
Wilson, T.D. (2006) "Editorial." Information Research, 11(4), editorial E114 [Available at: http://informationr.net/ir/11-4/editor114.html]
© the author, 2006. Updated 17 July, 2006
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