Information Research

Vol. 28 No. 3 2023

Editorial

Our adoption of OJS to manage the full production process of the journal continues to progress, with expected and unexpected glitches here and there, which Tobias Carlsson and Ty Nilsson cope with very effectively. Tobias is leaving us for a new job and we wish him well.

This quarter’s issue of the journal contains the usual variety of papers: from the mixed-methods study of the value of information services for students with disabilities, to a study of the “informational journey” of people who dress up and act out characters from the Star Wars films, is quite a leap! There are other investigations that might be said to lie between these two extremes, these range from another study of disabilities, in this case, the use of digital libraries by blind and visually-impaired persons, through a study of introducing information literacy into the librarianship curriculum in Bangladesh, to the evaluation of the scientific impact of Chinese scientists.

In other words, we have the usual interesting distribution of papers and the associated geographical distribution of authors.

Of course we also have the usual clutch of book reviews, including a new edition of Looking for information, by Givens, Case and Willson, which has adopted a new strategy for dealing with the volume of material that now exists. There’s also the fifth edition of Cassel and Hiremath, Reference and information services: an introduction; an Italian perspective on cataloguing and metadata, by Mauro Guerrini; a history of library digitization; and the history and potential future of American intelligence agencies. I’m sure that most readers will find something interesting.

Our thanks, as usual, to the reviewers, regional editors and copy-editors for keeping the journal on track. Commercial organizations that send us offers to buy the journal seem to be rather dazed that we can produce a quality journal on the basis of voluntary labour - and seem to lose interest.

Prof. Tom Wilson
Editor in Chief
September 2023