Annual Review of Information Science and Technology. Volume 36, 2002

Citation

Calvert, P. (2002), "Annual Review of Information Science and Technology. Volume 36, 2002", Online Information Review, Vol. 26 No. 5, pp. 350-351. https://doi.org/10.1108/oir.2002.26.5.350.3

Since its first appearance in 1966, ARIST has been one of the most eagerly awaited publications of the year. This is the first ARIST annual review from the new editor, Blaise Cronin, Rudy Professor of Information Science at Indiana University, and one of the leading thinkers in information science of the last two decades. As he says in the preface, the arrival of a new editor is usually announced by several changes to the style and content of a series. An obvious (and sensible) one is the adoption of the American Psychological Association’s referencing style. Other changes will be introduced slowly over a period of years. One of the most significant changes, though, is already evident in the greater breadth and style of the chapters in the current volume.

The easiest way to convey the breadth of topical coverage, and the quality of the authors, is to list the sections and chapters in full. Section 1, “Communication and collaboration”, contains chapters entitled “Scholarly communication and bibliometrics” by Christine Borgman and Jonathan Furner, “Collaboratories” by Thomas Finholt, “Computer‐mediated communication on the Internet” by Susan Herring. Section 2, “Knowledge discovery”, has chapters on “Organizational knowledge and communities of practice” by Elisabeth Davenport and Hazel Hall, “Discovering information in context” by Paul Solomon, “Data mining” by Gerald Benoit. In Section 3, “Intelligence and strategy”, there are chapters by Philip Davies (“Intelligence, information technology and information warfare”) and Pierrette Bergeron and Christine Hiller (“Competitive intelligence”). Section 4, “Information theory”, has chapters titled “Theorizing information for information science” by Ian Cornelius, “Social informatics: perspectives, examples and trends” by Steve Sawyer and Kristin Eschenfelder, “Intellectual capital” by Herbert Snyder and Jennifer Burek Pierce. In the final section, “Technology and service delivery”, the two chapters address “Digital libraries” (Edward Fox and Shalini Urs) and “Health informatics” (Marie Russell and Michael Brittain).

Cronin says he has encouraged authors to inject more of their own views into their writing, moving on from the useful, but sometimes pedestrian, bibliographical reviews found in previous volumes. “The aim … is to provide the reader with a balanced, though certainly not uncritical or characterless overview of current and emerging issues, a summary of recent work in the focal area, and a sense of the important research questions to be addressed’. The marvellous chapter on scholarly communication and bibliometrics by Borgman and Furner is an example of a thorough bibliographical review enhanced by apposite comments from the authors.

The choice of topics reflects Cronin’s broad church view of information science. A good example of this is Philip Davies’ chapter on information warfare – not exactly what some would regard as information science – but the vulnerability of information systems to terrorist attack, and the importance of information as a strategic tool reinforce the place of this topic in the discipline (see also Strategic Warfare in Cyberspace (Rattray, 2001)). Other topics that have not appeared in ARIST previously are intellectual capital and computer‐mediated communication, though partly it is Cronin’s original choice of authors that makes those chapters so different from the previous norm.

It is hard to imagine that there are professionals in information management who will not find at least one of these chapters essential reading. Digital libraries are now so much a part of the scene that you either need to read the chapter by Fox and Urs to ensure you have covered the literature yourself, or you need to read it to find out what all the fuss has been about. Perhaps at the other extreme is the chapter by Cornelius that is largely concerned with the theory of information. In between lies a mass of material, and I, for one, intend to keep this volume close at hand for quite some time.