Information Research Weblog

This from John Williams, author of a letter to the editor in the last issue of IR:

Good morning, Professor Wilson.

1.In case you missed it, the announcement of the sad and untimely death of Michie and McClaren can be found at either of these sites.

http://www.theregister.co.uk/2007/07/09/car_crash/

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/england/6281348.stm

2. Regarding my Letter in the current issue of IR, I have happened to find an even longer term that the Patent Office took in granting a patent. This was William Friedman's application of 1933 for a Cryptographic System. No version of the patent was ever declined by PTO (unlike Mooers' experience). However, it was not granted until August 2000, 31 years after his death. The Assignee was the National Security Agency. The Patent Number is 6,097,812. It would make an interesting book to discover the top 25 information technology patents that took the longest to be granted, by the way.

3. My two colleagues on the Mooers project have returned from a session of research at the Smithsonian Archives and their Watson Davis collection. Davis was Mooers' father-in-law. A number of things turned up, however there is one that might interest you. This was a letter to Davis written by John Mauchly in 1947 with a blind copy to Mooers. Mauchly sought Davis' advice on how to keep the general public informed of progress in electronics and computer science. Davis ran Science Service at the time and was able to give Mauchly some direction by return letter.

However, it's serendipitous that there is evidence of a need for popularizing computer science from Mauchly at the same time as Mooers and his wife published Electronics: What Everyone Should Know (1947: Bobbs-Merrill). Mooers, in publishing this book, was following the example of his friend Robert Fairthorne who had published several titles in Longman's March of Time series of popularizations of science/technology in the 1930's and 40'. Fairthorne's topics were aeroplanes, wireless, and cinema and television, among others. The wireless introduction became a British Army field manual during World War II, I believe.

4. One of my colleagues on the Mooers project is Gwen Alexander. She has just been appointed Dean of the Library School at Emporia State University. If you are coming to the States in the future, please drop me an email. Gwen would enjoy hosting a lecture by you to her students at the School. I've spoken to her and you can consider this a standing invitation.

Finally, congratulations on being number six in the survey of library science/information management literature. When I wrote the cohort section of the introduction to our bibliography of information retrieval and data mining five years ago, I predicted that a cohort would form around you and Information Research. That has happened. Your status pleases me and the recognition is well deserved.

Best regards,

John

If you use the World list of schools and departments of information science, etc. you will find a completely re-designed site when you next check it. Not all of the links have been checked in the process, but that task is ongoing. The new version has a significant increase in the number of departments recorded for India, thanks to Dr. V.J. Vijayakumar and I shall be updating the Far-eastern countries with information provided by Chris Khoo of Nanyang Technological University, Singapore.

If you spot errors in the directory, please let me know.

My thanks to Javier Martinez for drawing my attention to the fact that, for 2006, Information Research has moved up two places in the rankings, i.e., from 20th out of 53 to 18th out of 53.

However, the group of journals into which IR fits (Information Science & Library Science) is something of a rag-bag. It includes a number of journals whose first location is in information systems and a couple that are more concerned with communication sciences, so we can remove the following eleven journals (using ISI's abbreviations) as not really constituting 'competitors': INFORM SYST J, INFORM SYST RES, J HEALTH COMMUN, J INF TECHNOL, J MANAGE INFORM SYST, MIS QUART, RES EVALUAT, SCIENTIST, SOC SCI COMPUT REV, SOC SCI INFORM, TELECOMMUN POLICY, and J HEALTH COMMUN.

Of the remaining 42 journals, Information Research then ranks 12th. However, the Impact Factor is an odd measure because when we look at the different fields and different journals we find that it is, at least in part, a measure of what we were taught to call, in classification lectures, the 'extension' of the subject. One finds that 'niche' journals tend to have higher impact factors and, in subjects that are 'niche' subjects the average impact factor tends to be higher than in fields that are more diffuse in character - I'm busy working on a research note to explore this notion further - think of it as a hypothesis for now. The effect of this is that the JIF is not comparing like with like.

In the Information Science & Library Science group there are the following niche journals: COLL RES LIBR, ECONTENT, ELECTRON LIBR, GOV INFORM Q, INFORM SOC, INFORM TECHNOL LIBR, INT J GEOGR INF SCI, INTERLEND DOC SUPPLY, J ACAD LIBR, J AM MED INFORM ASSN, J GOV INFORM, J MED LIBR ASSOC, J SCHOLARLY PUBL, KNOWL ORGAN, LAW LIBR J, LIBR COLLECT ACQUIS, LIBR RESOUR TECH SER, ONLINE, ONLINE INFORM REV, PORTAL-LIBR ACAD, PROGRAM-ELECTRON LIB, REF USER SERV Q, RESTAURATOR and SCIENTOMETRICS. We also have a non-journal serial - ANNU REV INFORM SCI - which, again, has a special role in the field and, because of that role, is likely to have a high impact factor. Removing these 25 journals gives us 17 that we can define as 'general purpose' information science, library science or information management journals.

The 17 journals in rank order by impact factor are: INFORM MANAGE-AMSTER, J AM SOC INF SCI TEC, INFORM PROCESS MANAG, J DOC, LIBR INFORM SCI RES, INFORM RES, J INF SCI, INT J INFORM MANAGE, LIBR TRENDS, LIBR QUART, ASLIB PROC, J LIBR INF SCI, CAN J INFORM LIB SCI, LIBR J, LIBRI, Z BIBL BIBL and LIBR INFORM SC Actually, Library Journal ought not to be in there, since it isn't a research journal on a par with the rest, however, leaving it in, Information Research then ranks 6th.

This from Slashdot:

"A judge has delayed his ruling on the eBay patent infringement case. eBay has been involved in a legal dispute over the use of its popular "Buy it Now" button, which allows consumers to skip the bidding and purchase items on eBay directly. The patent suit was filed six years ago by MercExchange L.L.C. In May of 2003, a jury ruled in MercExchange's favor finding that eBay did in fact infringe on the patent, but in 2005 the US Supreme Court ruled that MercExchange was not automatically entitled to a court order blocking the offending service, essentially handing a victory down to patent reform advocates. However, the ruling by the Supreme Court does not affect the final judgment of the court."

Does this mean that 'Search' button on this page, or 'Post Item', or any other button (which, presumably, may simply be a link - like 'Home' on this page, could be illegal on the grounds that someone patented the idea?

Software patents really were the biggest nonsense perpetrated by the US Patent Office and are completely unnecessary: a program can be copyrighted, and copying of the entire programme or any significant part of it would be an infringement of copyright. Patenting simple interface features is crazy!

Sir Tim Berners-Lee is interviewed in this clip and defines the Semantic Web as 'the data web', suggesting that the emerging Semantic Web standards are all about enabling sites to be created that pull data in from various data bases to create new associations of data. It may be that 'data web' is a better term than 'semantic web', since the Web is already 'semantic' (see previous message), otherwise we wouldn't understand a word of what is there :-)

F.J. Devadason has produced an interesting paper on the notion of the Semantic Web - pointing out, rightly, that the Web is already semantic and that, perhaps, what is needed are maps to guide one through the forest, rather than additional codes added to Web pages. Read it here

For those interested in Open Access, there's an interesting PowerPoint presentation by the founders of a proposed new OA journal, Semantica and Pragmatics. They are going what I call the Platinum Route or True OA (TOA) to distinquish it from Green and Gold, which are author archiving and author payment. The more of these TOA journals (like Information Research) we have, the better!

In an earlier post I mentioned TiddlyWiki and my applications of it here and there. News about TiddlyWiki is best gathered by becoming a member of the relevant Google Group: one is for users in general and is mainly used for announcements and questions and answers - post a question and you'll usually get a very quick response from someone in the Group; the other is for those with the necessary technical skills to develop applications on TiddlyWiki or to contribute plug-ins and modifications.

Scanning both of these groups can be useful if you get into using TiddlyWiki: for example, a recent post drew my attention to Dave Gifford's Notes wiki, which is a nicely customised version for note taking with an excellent means of generating lists from the tags: you can get a version for yourself, if you right click on this link and then "Save link as...". That wiki advertised Dave's BibblyWiki - a version for creating and displaying bibliographic records of books and articles - again, get a copy by right clicking on this link and going through the same process. There's also a version in Spanish

The Developers' Group brought my attention to a number of things: a version of the basic TiddlyWiki in Brazilian Portuguese, and another in Portuguese Portuguese, and a very clever bookmarklet, which replaces the built-in search module of TW with YourSearch - not easy to describe what happens as a result but it means that you can search any TW with YourSearch. Of course, you need Firefox as your browser, although we are told that it may work in Opera and Safari

Thanks to Peter Suber's Open Access News for drawing attention to Alma Swan's new Weblog. The latest entry draws attention to the role of libraries in universities and comments:

The library is a woeful brand. Look on the website of almost any UK university and the library features under 'services' (or in some cases 'facilities') if it's lucky, or has to be specifically entered into the search box if it's not. And yet it is not so everywhere. In other parts of Europe, it is common for the library to be considered part of the academic fabric of an university, rather than a service department. Senior members of academic staff assume the role of university librarian for a period and then return to their department, while another takes over. In this way, the library is embedded in the academic framework of a university and is valued in a way that seems quite different to how libraries are valued in the UK.

Alma is certainly right about the problem of finding the library on the typical UK university site, and the pattern is repeated for public libraries, which are usually to be found only as a sub-site to the local authority's pages - often with the latter intruding on sidebars to draw attention to local authority pages rather than library pages - they're a mess.

However, I've worked in places in Europe where academics have been the 'librarian', and the experience has not always been good - with the downgrading of professional librarianship, and a lack of any professionalism on the part of the academic means that the library is often way down the budget greasy pole. In any event, finding a 'university library' in some countries can be a problem, since the 'faculty library' prevails, sometimes with a 'coordinator' trying to pull it all together and usually failing. So I'm not sure that the situation is any better.

The professional librarian in UK universities was the result of a long struggle to overcome the limitations of the 'academic in charge' model and, from observation of a number of cases, it seems to me that the problem has been not the lack of professional competency, but the dreaded 'new management' paradigm, where service agreements, budgetary stringency, etc., etc., have ruled in the majority of UK universities. This 'managerial' perspective, begun in the Thatcher years and happily continued by Major and Blair - and no doubt now by Gordon Brown, has been the chief agent of the destruction of genuine academic standards in UK universities. And it is the destruction of the academic ethos that has contributed to the decline of the library in the profile of the university.

There are times when the 'war or terror' paranoia exceeds even my expectations. There's a couple of lovely paranoia stories going the rounds - one about a suspect Canadian coin; the other about the wonderful Boston police force. But don't follow the links to Fox - the story has been pulled.

There's a lot of chatter on the Net about the latest Pew Internet study, which categorises IT users according to their relationship with the technology, from the Ominvores, who constitute 8% of the population of the USA, and who 'have the most information gadgets and services, which they use voraciously to participate in cyberspace and express themselves online and do a range of Web 2.0 activities such as blogging or managing their own Web pages.', to those who are Off the Network, and who have 'neither cell phones nor internet connectivity tend to be older adults who are content with old media', who constitute 15% of the population

c|net news has a nice pie chart of the data.

Thanks to Peter Suber's OA News for drawing attention to an item about the downside of Google Books.

It seems that the flaws are quite numerous but, to my mind readily fixable, if Google took a grip on quality control: it doesn't really take much to determine whether the scanned pages are of acceptable quality, for example.

This is a useful article and one that ought to be read by Google's executives - fix it guys before you lose credibility.

Peter Suber has an interesting comment on a message from Steven Harnad in Open Access News. He comments:

If there's a good OA journal in your field, and if it's no-fee or you can afford its fee or find a sponsor to pay it, then go for it. You'll help the journal and help yourself. But if there's not a good OA journal in your field, or if you can't afford the fee or find a sponsor to pay it, then remember that OA archiving provides bona fide OA. Publish in the best subscription journal that will accept your article and then deposit a copy of the postprint in an OA repository.

This seems to be eminently sensible advice and, as Information Research is a fully peer-reviewed journal of recognized quality, why do authors continue to submit to non-OA journals?

Rather more than 30 years ago I produced what was then called a 'programmed text' on chain indexing - apparently (at least according to a Google search) it still appears on some reading lists. The programmed text, in effect, implemented on paper the notion of hypertext.

I've occasionally thought of updating it, but not seriously until TiddlyWiki appeared on the scene. Now, as a result of a couple of days' work in retyping the text of the book, 'An introduction to chain indexing' is reborn as a true hypertext.

One of the benefits of using TiddlyWiki for this purpose is that the user can simply download a copy to his or her own hard disc (or portable medium of any kind) and use the text whether connected to the Internet or not, since everything needed to manipulate the text is actually built into the Web page.

I'll be interested to hear from anyone who uses the text or teaches the concept.

I picked up a second-hand copy of a book I'd seen reviewed some time back, The meaning of Tingo, by Adam Jacot de Boinod - the subtitle tells you what it is about - "...and other extraordinary words from around the world". My favourite to date and one that I think ought to be brought into the English language is, from the Japanese: potto: to be so distracted or preoccupied that you don't notice what is happening right in front of you.

The English usage would be quite natural I think: "I was completely potto...", "Excuse me (on bumping into someone), I was having a potto moment...", etc.

For those who thinking of moving up a class in wireless routers, here's a horror story about the gear. (Thanks to Bill Drew and the LITA discussion list.)

Quite by chance, I came across one of the most impressive pieces of 'Web-ware' I've seen to date. It is a stand-alone, browser-based, javascript-run personal wiki, which you can put on a Website, or simply use on your own PC to collect recipes, book details, extracts from papers to help you prepare a paper, organize your Ph.D. thesis notes, or whatever. Naturally, I couldn't help using it and you'll see the result (which took about a day's work to construct) in inforesearchwiki. This is, in effect, a database of the abstracts to papers published in volume 12 of Information Research, with a subject index constructed from the 'tags' (or index terms as we old school information scientists prefer) associated with each abstract.

TiddlyWiki has an enthusiastic world-wide communitity, doing all kinds of things with it and producing a variety of style sheets and plug-ins. As more than one user has said, it is a 'mind-blowing' piece of gear.

According to the book entitled, "Research in the Digitalized Age," written by Leslie F. Stebbins in chapter 2 states how to evaluate books and e-books, shortcuts for researchers and etc. During class I discovered a great resource for accessing free e-books which is Google Books. Google provides the majority of the certain books and for some books the entire book is easily accessible for free. How crazy is this? I never really looked into Google Books until I took LIS 620: Advanced Reference. I always thought there was a fee that was associated with accessing e-books. I will definitely explore this database instead of buying books that are available online for free.

According to The Association of College and Research Libraries, Information Literacy's website: http://www.ala.org/ala/acrl/acrlissues/acrlinfolit/informationliteracy.htm, it provides such a vast of valuable information for librarians, students, and researchers. The layout of the information is clearly organized for first time users and frequent users. The website provides users with the overview, standards & guidelines, resources & ideas, professional activity, and news. When I attending college for my undergraduate degree, it would have been benefical if I knew about this particular website...it probably would have made my research steps much easier.

There's a lovely, funny story by Alan Bennett on this topic in the 8th March issue of the London Review of Books. Not available online, but if your library doesn't have it, go out and buy a copy :-)

For those few remaining who believe that governments learn from the past, the current Private Eye has a fascinating account of the IT disaster (currently costing £12.4 billion!) in the National Health Service. Unfortunately, you'll have to buy the magazine to read it - but it is a good £1.50 worth!

In 1997 Tony Collins published "Crash: ten easy ways to avoid a computer disaster", which was republished a year later with a different subtitle and a 'year 2000 update'. In this book, Collins itemised the causes of computer disasters and it seems that pretty well every cause is found the the current debacle over the National Health Service. Overweaning ambition on the part of a health minister, personal pride on the part of the project manager, credulity of practically everyone in believing what the consultancies and software houses told them, etc., etc.

The only conclusion one can reach, given that Collins's record of computer disasters has been around for the past 10 years is that ministers and their adivising civil servants can't read.

I recently came across what appeared to be a well-organized open access Wiki service - "pbWiki" (an abbreviation for "Peanut Butter Wiki" - and I thought it might be worth trying as a kind of supplement to the journal, to which authors and readers could contribute in various ways. So - the Information Research Wiki now exists.

You will see that there are pages devoted to theory and methods and a page for beginners to ask questions and, I hope, to have them answered.

To contribute to the Wiki you'll need a password - you can mail me and I'll let you have one.

There's very little there at the moment, as I have just set it up - but take a look and let me know how you think it could be developed.

Finally, as this announcement tells us, Gmail will now accept applications directly, rather than being restricted to invitations from existing users.

Open sign-up for Gmail

No more waiting for an invitation: You can now sign up for your own Gmail account. Sign-ups are open worldwide in more than 40 languages. Now everyone can get the benefits of Gmail: fast and accurate search, a ton of free storage, chatting within Gmail, and access from your mobile phone. You can still invite your friends, but now you can also just tell them to visit the Gmail homepage. Don't miss the 4-part Gmail Theatre video, featuring our engineers and a cast of puppets, now playing on YouTube.
http://www.gmail.com
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_YUugB4IUl4

The owner, Rob Colston, has drawn my attention to learning-theories.com

This interesting site presents information and links on various theories of learning - many of which are also employed in information research. Here are a couple of Rob's definitions to whet your appetite:

What is a theory?

* A general principle that explains or predicts facts, observations or events.
* A theory is generally accepted as valid having survived repeated testing.
* Note: A theory can never be established beyond all doubt.

What is a model?

* A model is a theoretical construct or mental picture that helps one understand something that cannot easily be observed or experienced directly.

I've been corresponding with Francis J. Devadason (now retired to farming in Kansas!) about the failure of those promoting the notion of the 'semantic Web' to take proper notice of developments in classification stretching back to Kaiser's 'Systematic indexing' of 1911 (if there is anyone out there who knows who has my copy of that book, I'd be glad to have it back, please!) through Ranganathan's 'faceted classification', to Battacharyya's POPSI.

Those who don't know what I'm talking about may care to read some of the papers mentioned by Devadason:

• After the dot-bomb: getting Web information retrieval right this time, by Marcia J. Bates. [First Monday, 7(7)]
• Ranganathan had SEVEN facets and not FIVE – Semantic Web & Facet Analysis, by Francis J. Devadason
• Faceted indexing based system for organizing and accessing Internet resources, by Francis. J. Devadason, Neelawat Intaraksa, Ponprapa Patamawongjariya , and Kavita Desai
• Metadata: think outside the docs!, by Bob Doyle [eContent, May 3, 2005]
• The rise of ontologies or the reinvention of classification, by Dagobert Soergel [Journal of the American Society for Information Science. October 1999; 50(12): 1119-1120.]

The website http://www.libraries.psu.edu/ebsl/searchstrategies.htm provides the reader with great tips and ideas when searching for specific information. After reading the information on the website, it actually made my new searches easier with more articles that pertained to my topics. In the first section under Vocabulary Section, it discusses how one should keep a research log. Keeping a research log will save a lot of time by just jotting down little steps for each search. This is very important when you are trying to do a research paper.

I imagine that many will have seen notices to the effect that Lynn Brindley, Chief Executive of the British Library is making a special plea for support in what is called in the UK 'the public spending round', i.e., the time when all government departments negotiate with the Treasury on what share of the budget they are to have.

At the same time we have the news that preparing London for the 2012 Olympics is likely to cost something in the region of nine billion pounds. Money that will be found one way or another from the public purse.

I guess that one can expect no more from a government led by the fantasist Mr Bliar (the typo is deliberate) - one of the most uncultured prime ministers since the end of the Second World War. It seems that the height of his intellectual interests is in making friends with drunken rock musicians and fading pop stars. Curiously, I've only seen one political commentator calling him a fantasist - but it is pretty obvious from his personal history - after all a child chorister singing directly to God is bound to have the direct line, isn't he? And if the rock band didn't work out and if the legal career was going nowhere, I guess the best place to work out your fantasies is in politics.

I see that the BBC's technology news

has an item today on 'social tagging' - i.e., 'indexing' :-)

In the article entitled, "Public Services in Special Collections" by Florence Turcotte it explains how some research libraries are trying to bring in K-12 students into the "real research world." I think it would be very cool for a k-12 student to have field trips to famous public & research libraries especially in New York City. I also believe the children will be amazed at the architecture of the building let alone the information inside. If students were more exposed to the "real research world" as they grew older they will appreciate the nature of research. When I was in high school my firends dreaded going to the public library to research information. They dreaded the fact because I never learned how to research information correctly. Luckily, I worked at my local public library since I was about 14 years old...so I was taught by the reference librarian (friend/co-worker. My experiences with researching information in high school was a breeze. It was just a matter of when I was going to sit down and read, digest and spit out information on my computer.

Lots of news and associated links at Wi-fi Planet

Jim Hartley is running a study on people's perceptions of abstracts in journal articles. He would be pleased if you were willing to help. All you have to do is to click on to the address below and press a few buttons.

http://www.keele.ac.uk/depts/ps/jimh/abstracts2007.htm

If you would like more information, please contact Jim at j.hartley@psy.keele.ac.uk

There's a debate (sometimes bad-tempered) going on at the Library and Information Technology discussion list as to the deleterious effects of wi-fi networks in libraries. This results from one college librarian having resigned because the college authorities refused to discuss the issue.

As far as I can see, there's not a lot of work specifically on wi-fi networks: most research seems to be concerned with mobile phones. However, this bit of work seems interesting and, perhaps, puts the debate into some kind of rational context:

J. Boyle Wireless technologies and patient safety in hospitals.
Telemed J E Health. 2006 Jun;12(3):373-82.

CSIRO E-Health Research Centre, a joint venture between Australia's Commonwealth Scientific and Industrial Research Organisation and the Queensland Government, Brisbane, Australia. Justin.Boyle@csiro.au
In the development of policies for wireless technologies, it is important for healthcare organizations to reduce risks to patients from use of wireless devices. Policy should be devised for instructing hospital staff, visitors, and patients, avoiding unwarranted restrictions but not ignoring evidence regarding potential interference problems, and allowing comparison with other clinical facilities of benefits of policy. To inform policy developers and a general audience of hospital personnel, a review was conducted on the safety of wireless devices for communication within hospitals. This review targeted electromagnetic interference effects of devices on medical devices and summarises key recommendations from published reports and international standards. There is consensus that the highest risk of interference occurs with two-way radios used by emergency crews, followed by mobile phones, while radio local area networks produce negligible interference. Wireless technologies are deemed suitable for use throughout hospital areas including intensive care units and operating rooms, given that recommended separation distances from medical equipment are observed.

There's other work on similar lines suggesting that wi-fi networks are OK to use in hospitals - and if there, why not in libraries?

As an aside, why is it that some people are unable to participate in online discussions without becoming abusive?

The latest issue of Information Research is now available at http://InformationR.net/ir/

Here is the Editorial

Introduction Managing an electronic journal is a non-trivial task and, although I have Associate Editors who help greatly in the process of evaluating submissions, the main work of getting the issues out is down to me. With the loss of my volunteer proof-reader, Rae-Ann Hughes, the checking is an additional load. It is something of a relief, therefore, to know that Lund University Libraries (our host institution for the server) is implementing the journal management package, Open Journal Systems. Together with the Associate Editors, I am in the process of testing the system and hope, shortly, that all submissions will be handled through OJS.

This said, there is still room for more volunteers to help with the production of the journal: ideally, a proof-reader who knows British English and an XHTML code editor would be very useful. So, if you have a little time on your hands (a vain hope in these days of overwork!), or if you are recently retired and interested in helping the open access movement, do contact me.

And, speaking of volunteers, thanks to Elena Maceviciute for her link checking this issue - a bigger task than usual, and to Pedro Dias and Jose Vicente Rodriguez for the Spanish abstracts; again, a much bigger task than previously.

In this issue The main work of this issue has been in preparing the final batch of papers from the Information Seeking in Context Conference, which was held in Sydney last year. As usual, the range is very wide, from the information needs of Iranian engineers, to the information behaviour of Taiwanese aborigines—evidence that the information behaviour field is dynamic and growing. Very few of the authors, however, explore the implications of their work for information practice, and I hope that the 2008 conference (to be held in Vilnius, Lithuania) will address this issue.

We also have five other peer-reviewed papers and another open access case study. The five papers cover very different topics: professional education in Brazil, Internet services in the countries of the European Union, students' use of the Internet for their Finnish Masters' theses, the impact of the Terrorist bombings in Madrid on the 11th March, 2004, on newspaper documentation centres (in Spanish) and a workflow model for scholarly communication. This last one is very long for a paper and the author has provided a link to a .pdf file so that you may print it out more easily. The case study deals with Medical Education Online, which was established (like Information Researh) by an individual, enthused by the idea of open access publishing.

Partly because of the ISIC papers, we have a good geographic spread of papers in this issue: USA - 4, Finland - 3, Japan - 2, Spain - 2, Brazil - 1, Canada - 1, Iran - 1, Singapore - 1, Taiwan - 1, UK - 1.

Google Analytics As I noted in the previous issue, I now use Google Analytics to monitor the use of the journal and (at the time of writing) I now have four months of data. The data show that the top page of the journal has had 35,323 'unique views' and 66,145 'page views' in this time - which I assume means that each visitor comes back to the top page ('home' on the navigation bar) at least once after the initial click. Extrapolating that for 2006 as a whole suggests that the top page has had 105,969 unique views and 198,435 page views. I've also been using OneStat.com since last April and it shows 32,517 page views for the top page in eight months - extrapolating gives us 48,775 for the year, which is significantly fewer than suggested by Google Analytics, so I'm not quite sure what's going on there :-). However, in 2005 we had 47,117 hits, so usage continues to increase. One thing is certain: the papers in Information Research are getting a lot of exposure!

The Editorial Board I am making changes to the Editorial Board, with a view to stabilizing membership by the beginning of the next volume. Membership is for a period of three years, renewable, and some members are now due to retire, so with this issue, we welcome three new members of the Editorial Board: Jim Jansen, Victor Kaptelinin and Bonnie Nardi. Jim strengthens our representation of the Web research community, while Bonnie and Victor, apart from helping review papers for the activity theory issue due in April, strengthen the information systems area. Welcome folks!

The journal's publication schedule will also be changing, partly to bring the volume year into line with the calendar year and partly to avoid holiday periods as far as possible. So, this year, the final two issues of Volume 12 will be published in April and October and Volume 13 will have its four issues in March, June, September and December of 2008, with subsequent volumes having the same publication pattern. This way, I might actually have some holiday time at Christmas!

Given how far the month is advanced, it may seem a little late, but... a very Happy New Year!

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Professor Tom Wilson, Publisher/Editor-in-Chief January 2007