Editorial

Welcome, everyone to the true beginning of the Third Millenium, and welcome to an anniversary of kinds for the journal - in this issue we publish our one-hundredth paper, which, entirely by chance, is Imposed information seeking in public libraries and school library media centers: a common behaviour?, by Melissa Gross - one of the Refereed Workshop Papers from ISIC3, held in Gothenburg last August.

We have an appropriately 'bumper' issue to celebrate the Millenium – quite how many paper pages it would consume I would not like to think. However, electronically they are all one page long, and we are consuming no trees - e-journals are 'green' journals.

The issue is in four parts: Part 1 is the special issue on ontology and classification, edited by Jian Qin and her colleagues from Syracuse University; Part 2 consists of three regular, refereed papers, which reflect the international nature of the journal – one is from the Slovak Republic, one from Singapore, and one from the UK. The last of these will be of considerable interest to researchers in the UK who have to look forward to the Research Assessment Exercise mounted by the Higher Education Funding Councils.

Part 3 of the contents consists of six papers accepted for the Workshop session of the third conference on Information Seeking in Context, held in Gothenburg, Sweden, last August. Finally, Part 4 consists of papers delivered at the Doctoral Workshop at the same conference. We published papers from the ISIC 2 Workshop in the October 1998 issue and I believe them to be an excellent way for doctoral students to begin the publication process.

I noticed that one of the places from which IR is accessed is the Anbar databases site, where it appears as a four-star site for computing information. The review notes:

The range of topics covered is wide, as can be seen from the subject index, and the tendency is more to information than information systems in the computing sense. Nevertheless, there are topics considered that should be of interest to those whose main interest is computing. There is free access to the journal and both free-text and keyword searches are available. There are also links to other digital resources in this field. The site is attractive and speedy, looking rather different from most academic sites, which is refreshing.

I do like the idea of being refreshingly different from most academic sites!

The counter on the top page of the journal lets me see where the last 25 hits have linked from and I'm in the process of collecting the data for a research note - it is interesting to see, for example, that 50% of the hits come from either on-line directories, such as Yahoo!, and from library lists of electronic journals, whereas only about 15% come from search engines.

For those who hate long URLs, you can now access the journal at: http://InformationR.net/, or even http://www.InformationR.net, if you can't get out of the habit of beginning every URL with 'www' - yes, we have our own domain name, purchased by the Editor/publisher at enormous cost. Why 'InformationR'? Simply because all the other, more obvious domain names had been bought already - sometimes by speculators seeking to make a profit and of the alternatives I could think of, this was about the shortest.

A very happy new Millenium to you all.

Information Research is designed, maintained and published by Professor Tom Wilson. Papers © the authors, 1995-2001; design and editorial content © T.D. Wilson, 1995-2001