Vol. 12 No. 2, January 2007
| Vol. 12 No. 2, January 2007 | ||||
My call in the Editorial for the last issue for help with copy-editing the papers for the journal resulted in three volunteers: Eli Guinnee, Lauren Goodchild and Peta Wellstead - located, interestingly, respectively, in the USA, the UK and Australia. They have all tested their skills on one or two papers and have been a big help with this issue. Our long-term copy-editor, RaeAnn Hughes, has also re-surfaced after a long illness and will be back on the team for the next issue.
And, while we are on volunteers, thanks to Elena Maceviciute for link-checking and to Pedro Dias and Jose Vicente Rodriguez for the Spanish abstracts.
We have also started using Open Journal Systems for all submissions and I hope that this will prevent the occasional item from slipping through the net and failing to be reviewed. It seems to be working well, with only one or two minor problems. If you wish to submit a paper, go to the site, register as an Author and then follow the instructions for submitting a paper. The general rules for the preparation of papers are on that site, as well as at the Instructions for Authors location.
This issue is an almost 50:50 split between papers on activity theory for the thematic issue and those on a variety of topics, which have been submitted in the normal way. The activity theory papers are the subject of another editorial by Guest Editor, Dr. Mark Spasser, so I shall refrain from comment here, except to that Mark for his work on behalf of the journal and also to remark upon one of the items, which is not a paper, but a full-length book—a first for the journal.
The book, Human activity, by Benny Karpatschof, is not seeing its first publication; it was published originally, in a small edition, by the Dansk Psykologisk Forlag and its publication here was suggested by Prof. Birger Hjørland of the Royal School in Copenhagen and Birger also provides a review of the book in our book review section. The book was provided as a set of .pdf files and, apart from the top page, they remain in that form since conversion to xhtml would be a major task.
The 'non-thematic' papers in the issue cover a wide range of topics, as usual: one is in Portuguese (our first in this language) and one is in Spanish. The Portuguese paper deals with stemming algorithms for the Portuguese language and comes from Brazil. The authors conclude that Portuguese has not had a great deal of attention from this point of view and, perhaps, needs further algorithms to be developed. The Spanish paper is on information literacy in public libraries; this is a somewhat under-developed area and the authors argue that information literacy programmes in public libraries should be a priority if life-long learning is to be a reality.
The English language papers are equally diverse, covering factors that affect the implementation of information technology in the financial services industry; the dynamics of community network development in the north-east USA, and the information seeking behaviour of Jewish scholars in Israeli universities.
The Reviews section includes a review of the second edition of Donald Case's now standard work on Looking for information, now covering more than 1,000 sources on the subject of information seeking behaviour, as well as reviews of a wide range of books of interest to the 'information' field. We also have a review of a piece of Web-ware (again, a first for the journal), TiddlyWiki, which is a very easy to use tool, requiring the download of only a single Web page, which then serves as the template for your own wiki. I've used this to create a database of the abstracts and editorials in the current volume of the journal as a demo of what can be done.
As announced in the last issue, we now have a longish pause before the final issue of Volume 12 in October, with the first issue of Volume 13 coming in March, 2008.
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