Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (Volume 40)

Citation

Calvert, P. (2006), "Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (Volume 40)", Online Information Review, Vol. 30 No. 2, pp. 195-197. https://doi.org/10.1108/14684520610659229

The arrival of the ARIST volume is always one of the highlights of the book reviewer's year, and this year, which brings us the 40th volume, is no exception. In his Introduction, Cronin points out that some of the chapter topics from 40 years ago, such as “automated language processing”, “selected hardware developments”, “content analysis” and “representation and control”, which were all in Volume 1 would not be out of place in 2006. Being able to track the development of subjects over time by looking back over previous ARIST chapters is one of the benefits of this annual volume.

I have sometimes wondered how long it takes to write an ARIST chapter. The commitment must be considerable considering the high level of scholarship displayed, both in the knowledge of the literature, and the insights provided by the writers. As Cronin points out in his Introduction, we owe a debt to the selfless scholars who are willing to devote their time and energy to these chapters at a time when performance related funding is affecting universities almost worldwide. Perhaps a few of the authors cite themselves rather too much but I think we can forgive them for that!

The structure of this volume is quite straightforward. There are four sections on broad themes, each consisting of three or four chapters, with a total of 13 chapters. The first section, Information and Society, includes chapters on the economics of information, the geographies of the internet and the hot topic of open access. These are topics that generate much contention among librarians, though perhaps not so much contention at the knowledge management end of the professional spectrum. Sandra Braman has done an excellent job of mixing the historical development of the discipline with an examination of new and relevant theories, and she throws in a few intriguing policy questions for good measure. Anyone familiar with the writing of Castells will appreciate Matthew Zook's chapter on the geographies of the internet. He concludes that “place” remains central to all internet geographies, using the example of wireless internet‐enabled telephony that is still dependent upon a location in a “hot spot”, while simultaneously connecting the user to global networks and the web of information. When writing about topics such as open access, it must be difficult for an author to avoid letting personal beliefs and intentions intrude into an otherwise objective account. Carl Drott does let his views slip a few times, but given that we must accept this happening with contentious subjects, the reader will be prepared to work around these views. This is a chapter that would serve as a very good reading for students approaching the subject at a postgraduate level.

Section 2 is labelled Technology and Systems. Donna Harman and Ellen Voorhees have given us a clear description of the role and uses of TREC (the Text REtrieval Conference), which was established in 1992 as a test bed for experiments retrieving information from digital text documents, mostly using statistical techniques first suggested by Cleverdon's Cranfield experiments. Since its early use for developing improved techniques for text retrieval, TREC has developed tracks in Spanish and Chinese, and more recently has moved beyond text with the opening of OCR, speech and video tracks. Those readers really interested in TREC should turn to TREC: Experiment and Evaluation in Information Retrieval, edited by Voorhees and Harman (Voorhees and Harman, 2005).

The complexity and ambiguity of language, especially the English language, has caused problems in information retrieval since it began, and even the use of massive computing will not necessarily make for better retrieval unless we understand the structures of the language in the documents we are searching. That is what Chris Khoo and Jin‐Cheon Na have examined in their very thorough chapter, “Semantic relations in information science”. The first part of their chapter deals with language itself, to show how complex it is and how much meaning comes from semantic relationships embedded in the text. They then look at how semantics have been used in thesauri, indexes/subject headings and ontologies to date. Perhaps not surprisingly, the linguistic work described in the first part of the chapter does not always seem to have been used when designing the retrieval tools we use on a daily basis. They also discuss the potential of automatic identification of semantic relationships, which ironically can often be perceived by humans at a fraction of the speed it will take a large computer.

Hsinchun Chen and Jennifer Xu look at the use of informatics to improve security. They recommend the application of six types of techniques for knowledge discovery in databases. This chapter includes six case studies of using information and knowledge management for capturing, accessing, analysing, visualising, and sharing law‐enforcement and intelligence related information. The connection between intelligence and information management has often been under‐appreciated, so this chapter, Cronin's chapter from volume 39, plus another ASIST publication: Covert and Overt: Recollecting and Connecting Intelligence Service and Information Science, (Williams and Lipetz, 2005) will go some way to improving the profession's perception of the link.

The third section covers familiar territory in Information Needs and Use. The first chapter, by Donald Case, is a good review of recent literature on information behaviour. The very extensive bibliography is valuable in its own right. The majority of research in information seeking has focused on the individual, yet students often search for information together, and people in a business will often share the load of gathering relevant information, so to examine this Jonathan Foster has reviewed recent research in social and collaborative approaches into information seeking and retrieval. The need to develop systems to assist collaborative searching has concentrated some attention on this subject, and Foster includes mention of those that are appearing. Anu MacIntosh‐Murray and Chun Wei Choo examine the worrying problem of information failures in health care which have been brought to light by recent cases and subsequent public inquiries in the UK and Canada. There is a great deal here to ponder, including the pervasive systems thinking that can smother human initiative, plus the tendency to shoot the messenger. The final chapter in this section introduces Workplace Studies (WPS), a socio‐technical research perspective that deals with the way people use technology. Here, a group of writers from the University of Cincinnati apply WPS to technological change, especially the failure of large information systems.

The fourth section is a mix of three theoretical perspectives. Alistair Black has carved out a considerable reputation writing about library history. Here he has tried to extend this subject to the whole of information history, which he differentiates from the history of information. To give an idea how he has defined and structured the topic, his chapter segments are: the history of print and written culture, which includes the history of libraries; the history of more recent information disciplines such as information management and information science; the history of “contiguous areas” such as the history of the information society and information infrastructure; and lastly, the history of information as social history, with emphasis on the importance of historical information networks. Applying a different theory, Fallis discusses social epistemology and information science. Social epistemology is usually associated with Jesse Shera, but his main concern was how knowledge was intertwined with libraries. Though testing at times, this is a fascinating chapter for anyone who feels the need for a better theoretical basis for information work. The final chapter in the volume will be the first time that many readers have heard about formal concept analysis, a method for data analysis which has been developed mostly by German academics. Here Uta Priss applies this method to information science, and she shows that it has considerable potential in areas such as information retrieval and knowledge representation.

As usual, I recommend this annual to all libraries, large and small. It is one of the few essential purchases for library and information management collections.