We have now closed the original server in the University of Lund and transferred operations to the University of Borås, using the latest version of OJS. We are not yet at the point of being able to publish the journal through OJS, but that will be done eventually. I would like to thank colleagues in Lund for the excellent support they have provided over the years since the journal was transferred to their server.

This issue

We have nine papers in this issue, and, as usual, they cover diverse range of issues. Two of the papers relate to information behaviour: Birgit Kvikne and Gerd Berget explore the information seeking behaviour of people with aphasia. This is a very problematic area to study, since people suffering from aphasia, as the word suggests, have difficulty in remembering words. The authors tackled this problem in an interesting way. The other paper in this area, by Naresh Agarwal is the development of something I've occasionally thought of doing and have mentioned in a number of papers, but Naresh has actually done it - the creation of a unified model of information seeking behaviour through a thorough analysis of existing models.

We also have a couple of papers on aspects of information literacy: Muhammad Asif Naveed and Muhammad Kamran studied information literacy among investigative officers in the Punjab Police, while Kanwal Ameen and Salman Bin Naeem looked at the news literacy skills of university librarians in Pakistan.

Another two papers are related to information retrieval: one, by Liezl H. Ball, and Theo J.D. Bothma describe the problems and solutions for extracting words and phrases of particular kinds from digital collectons. Sinyinda Muwanei and five colleagues explore information retrieval metrics, using deep learning methods.

Finally, we have three papers on different topics: one on an analysis of bibliographic coupling research from 1963 to 2020, by Tsu-Jui Ma and colleagues; one on the lurkers in virtual communities, arguing that achievement goals motivate lurkers - they conclude that "people who are worried about their incompetence (performance-avoidance goal) choose to lurk". Wen-Yau Liang and colleagues explore dual-coding theory (i.e., the combined us of text and image) in recommender systems, and conclude that systems that employ both text and image are more likely to encourage continuance of use of the system.

The geographical distribution of the authors is wide as usual, with contributions from Malaysia, Norway, Pakistan, South Africa, Taiwan, and the USA. Submissions from Western Europe in general have been falling recently and one wonders if the pandemic and the redistribution of resources has resulted in a lack of funding for research.

Finally

Our thanks, as usual, to the regional editors who see the papers through the review process, our copy-editors who try to ensure the readability of the texts, to the many reviewers and members of the Editorial Board who help to maintain the quality of the papers published. Without their dedication to the open access ideal, the journal would not exist.


Professor T.D. Wilson
Editor-in-chief
June, 2021.