Editorial
Introduction
The entry to our 18th year of publication has been rather stressful, with the second batch of ISIC papers to be published, along with ten 'regular' papers. Of course the problems start with publication, as errors are discovered by authors and Associate Editors and need to be corrected. And then there's the mailing to over 3,000 regular readers to announce the new issue - that brings back up to a hundred or more 'underliverable' notices, meaning that those names have to be removed. So far, from this mailing, sixty-two names have had to be removed. It would help to reduce the workload if readers could be persuaded to advise me of e-mail account changes: if you are a student, finishing a course, send me your e-mail address change
Another problem is that the ISIC papers do not go through the copy-editing process of the journal, meaning that the last minute work of checking, extends not to minutes per paper, but to hours per paper. And the major cause of that is authors inability to read the instructions on citation and referencing. Authors submit reference lists, which, if they were from students, would be sent back with red marks all over them. It appears that the loss of cataloguing from the curriculum in librarianship and information science (and it never existing in information systems!) has resulted in a huge gap in people's knowledge of how to represent a document in a reference list! One shudders to think of the kind of standards that are being followed in instructing students and supervising PhD candidates. The effect of all this is general fatique and this Editorial, as a result, is brief.
This issue
As noted above, we have the second tranche of papers from the ISIC conference, held in Tokyo last year: for once, the proceedings are not complete. It seems that the keynote speakers were not asked to prepare a paper for publication, which is a pity, because such papers are often an opportunity to develop new themes of research, or to reflect upon progress to date in a particular sphere. This year the authors of 'short presentations' were asked to submit their papers to the journal for further review, some did not do so, so their papers are also missing.
We have ten 'regular' papers in this issue, covering a wide variety of topics, with authors from Australia, Canada, China, Iran, Korean, Taiwan, Spain, the UK and the USA.
We have contributions on information behaviour, including information searching and information needs - in addition to those papers on these topics in the ISIC proceedings; on electronic medical records, linked data, strategic alignment of information technology with business objectives, environmental scanning by academic library managers, electronic document and records management systems, and 'big-data' in cloud computing. Something for everyone, perhaps.
Lastly
My usual thanks to the Associate Editors who help with seeing papers through the review process, the copy-editors who help authors to produce readable papers that observe the journal's Style Manual, and, by no means least, the referees who continue to support open access publishing by freely giving their time to the analysis of submissions. Thanks, too, to Pedro Diaz and José Vicente Rodriquez for the Spanish translation of the abstracts - a pretty significant task with this issue..
Professor Tom Wilson, Publisher/Editor-in-Chief
March, 2013