Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, Vol. 36

Citation

Chowdhury, G. (2003), "Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, Vol. 36", The Electronic Library, Vol. 21 No. 2, pp. 172-173. https://doi.org/10.1108/02640470310470570

Since its first appearance in 1966, ARIST has become a leading annual publication in information science providing comprehensive reviews of different topics in information science and technology. ARIST has been edited quite efficiently by Professor Martha Williams for the past 25 years. After a quarter of a century there now has been a change in the editorship, and this is the first volume from the new editor Professor Blaise Cronin, Rudy Professor of Information Science, and Dean of the School of Library and Information Science at Indiana University, Bloomington, USA.

The new editor has brought in quite a few changes. The major physical, and hence more visible, changes include the following:

• •

  the adoption of the APA (American Psychological Association) referencing style;

• •

  there has also been a change in the publication schedule – ARIST will now appear at the beginning of each calendar year;

• •

  each volume will contain short biographic entries on the volume’s contributors;

• •

  the index will cover the text of the volume, but not the bibliographic references.

The changes that are not quite visible, but are designed to bring in improvements in qualities of the publication include the following:

• •

  The editor has expressed his intentions of bringing in contributors from various disciplines from all over the world. While some of the contributors, in his words, will be “insiders” (i.e. will have an information science background), there will also be contributions from the so‐called “outsiders” (i.e. experts who do not specially come from the information science background).

• •

  The contributors are given more freedom so that each ARIST chapter, according to the editor, can “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” (p. vii).

• •

  The coverage of ARIST will be broadened, so that (according to the editor) it “neither abandons its heartland market nor fails to establish a credible presence in emerging areas of importance to the wider information science community” (p. ix).

Volume 36 contains 13 chapters contributed by a total of 20 authors. The chapters have been arranged under five sections. Section I entitled “Communication and collaboration” includes three chapters. In the first chapter entitled “Scholarly communication and bibliometrics”, Christine Borgman and Jonathan Furner discuss trends in scholarly communications since 1990. In the second chapter entitled, “Collaboratories”, Thomas Finholt reviews the various collaboratory efforts in science and concludes with an assessment of the future directions. The third chapter has a self‐explanatory title of “Computer‐mediated communication on the Internet”, and builds on a somewhat similar chapter entitled “Computer‐mediated communication” that appeared in ARIST 1986. Here, the author, Susan Herring, reviews empirical research since the 1980s on online communication in non‐institutional and non‐organizational contexts.

The second part of the volume, entitled “Knowledge discovery”, includes three chapters. Elisabeth Davenport and Hazel Hall in their chapter entitled “Organizational knowledge and communities of practice” cover three major areas, namely:

1. 1.

   (1) studies of situated learning;

2. 2.

   (2) studies of distributed cognition; and

3. 3.

   (3) studies of linguistic communication, that contribute to the concept of “communities of practice”.

Paul Solomon, in his chapter entitled “Discovering information in context”, analyses the frequently studied topics of information needs, information search behaviour, etc., but from a different point of view. In the words of the author, this chapter discusses, “what information is to people, how stuff ends up becoming information, and how information so discovered influences further action” (p. 230). In chapter 6, “Data mining”, Gerald Benoît provides a detailed account of the concept and processes of data mining followed by a review of literature published between 1997 and 2000.

Section III of this volume, entitled “Intelligence and strategy”, contains two chapters on topics that were covered partially under different former ARIST chapter headings. Chapter 7, entitled “Intelligence, information technology, and information warfare” by Philip Davies, discusses intelligence and information warfare in the context of national security, and chapter 8 entitled “Competitive intelligence”, by Pierrette Bergeron and Christine Hiller, reviews the evolution of competitive intelligence since 1994.

Section IV (“Information theory”) contains three chapters discussing the literature on information science from different perspectives. In chapter 9 (“Theorizing information for information science”), Ian Cornelius reviews work from inside and outside the field of information science. In chapter 10 (“Social informatics: perspectives, examples, and trends”), Steve Sawyer and Kristin Eschenfelder provide an introduction to social informatics, and then review the research and trends in the field. Herbert Snyder and Jennifer Pierce (“Intellectual capital”) provide a history of the term intellectual capital (IC) followed by a review of literature that discusses the various methods of calculating the value of IC.

The last two chapters in the volume have been presented in a section (section V) called “Technology and service delivery”. “Digital libraries” by Ed Fox and Shalini Urs is a new chapter in ARIST. The authors here have neatly reviewed the fast growing multi‐faceted field of digital library research. In the last chapter (“Health informatics”) Marie Russel and J. Michael Brittain review the field since its last appearance in 1998 under three broad headings: health systems, professionals and patients; evidence‐based medicine and its implications; and e‐health.

The volume is quite big with 690 pages. However, the lengths of the chapters vary significantly; there are some chapters that are almost double the size of others. Overall, this volume of ARIST covers a wide range of topics, some entirely new, while some built on the previous ARIST chapters. The present volume, like its predecessors, contains a wealth of information for academics, researchers and practitioners in information science and technology.