Information Research Weblog

I imagine that most readers of this Weblog will have heard of Google's acquisition of gapminder.com and its Trendalyzer software. Recently, in relation to this, I came across a reference to www.ted.com, where TED = Technology, Entertainment and Design, and to a video by Hans Rosling, a Professor of Public Health in Sweden with 20 years experience of health research in Africa. Rosling was the inspiration behind gapminder.com and the TED site has an incredible video of his performance at the annual TED conference in Monterey, California. I recommend it: for the subject matter, for the presentation and demonstration of the power of Trendalyzer, and for the surprise ending. Go take a look.

Take a look also at the other videos available - there are some outstanding presentations: I particularly liked that by Evelyn Glennie, the star percussionist, who has been deaf since she was 12 - wonderful stuff; but there are many more available, such as James Watson, Jimmy Wales, E.O. Wilson - and that's just in the "Ws"! I think I'm going to be viewing these videos for weeks ahead!

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

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

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.

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.

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.]

There's an interesting paper in the January issue of JASIST: Using the h-index to rank influential British researchers in information science and librarianship by Charles Oppenheim. This demonstrates that the leading researcher in the UK is my former colleague, Peter Willett - a fact that doesn't surprise me, although it will surprise those who have carried out citation studies and have used only the Social Science Citation Index - most of Peter's work is in chemoinformatics and information retrieval and much of his research is covered only by the Science Citation Index.

There are one points of argument in the paper, e.g., I am still research active, although retired, and Beaulieu is not yet retired, and, I think, still associated with the Department at Sheffield. I'd also be rather doubtful about including Harnad as an information scientist - he's a publicist for open access, but his research is in cognitive psychology.

However, read the paper and make up your own mind :-)

For years I used the free analytics site NedStat - originally set up by the Netherlands Statistical Office - but they sold out and the new company started using pop-up ads, so moved to OneFreeStat.com. Here's their analysis of the hits on the 'top ten' pages of the journal from April to December. It's interesting that the most hit paper is in Spanish: justification, I think for my decision to include papers in Spanish in the journal. After all, it is an 'international electronic journal', so why not? :-)

Table 1: OneStatFree analysis of pageviews from April to December 2006

Rank	Page	Pageviews	%
1.	Journal home page	37,753	34.63%
2.	Other	9,970	9.15%
3.	Contents page Vol. 11 No. 3	5,988	5.49%
4.	Contents page Vol. 11 No. 4	5,557	5.10%
5.	Paper258-Herrera-Solano & Hassan (in Spanish)	5,266	4.83%
6.	Contents page Vol. 12 No. 1	5,021	4.61%
7.	Contents page Vol. 11 No. 2	4,466	4.10%
8.	Paper254-Ankem	2,283	2.09%
9.	Paper260-Wilson	2,135	1.96%
10.	The Rest	30,559	28.04%
Total		108,998	100.00%

However for the site as a whole (i.e., information.r.net) I use Google Analytics, which has some pretty pictures:

 

 

This shows some interesting things: most visitors have been new visitors (almost by definition, given the short time the counters have been active), but 20% are returning visitors. When we compare that number with the percentage who come directly to the site (usually from bookmarks), i.e., 26%, we can guess that, probably, most of those who come directly, are returning visitors - my regular readers, if you like. The map is also instructive (although not as much as in the earlier message), particularly when you see the big bulge of users from China.

The 'top ten' pages from Google Analytics (covering the whole site, remember) are, naturally, different from the top ten identified by OneFreeStat.com:

Table 2: Google Analytics report

Rank	Page	Unique views	Page views
1.	Information Research (journal top page)	32,505	60,904
2.	World list... information studies, information management, etc	6,694	11,890
3.	Electronic Resources for Research Methods	5,314	9,124
4.	Europe: World list...	1,305	3,335
5.	(Page without the title tag)	1,809	2,561
6.	Information management (Wilson - Encyclopedia entry)	2,164	2,515
7.	USA - World list...	1,174	2,444
8.	Digital information in the Information Research field (open access magazines, etc.)	1,437	2,100
9.	World list... USA (a duplicate page - needs removing!)	790	1,943
10.	Alfred Schutz, phenomenology (Wilson - conf. paper)	1,637	1,820
Totals (whole site)		94,310	147,149

Maintaining this entire site is a pretty time-consuming task - or set of tasks! However, it looks as though most of what is provided is being used, and it will be interesting to see what the picture looks like when the Analytics cover an entire year. (Incidentally, it also shows the benefits of archiving your publications on your home site.)

All of this stuff is going to be used in one of the Open Access Case Studies running in the journal, so watch out for an update some time next year.

A slightly (unintentionally?) comic story from Ireland, which includes:

Close to one third of Irish CFOs (chief financial officers) have said that improving the quality of information management will be a key business challenge over the next 12 to 18 months, new research has found.

Makes one wonder what they've been doing up 'til now!

And:

One of the event speakers, Justin Scanlan of PwC’s performance improvement section, commented: "Following PwC's data management survey, three out of four companies reported 'significant problems' as a result of inaccurate data that led to added costs, failure to meet strategic objectives, poor service and eroded shareholder value among them. Information management is no longer an IT issue and is now firmly on the corporate agenda."

Ah! So that was the problem: information management had been seen as 'an IT issue'...

It's a highly technical field that requires years of academic training and discipline. Many people develop basic skills using this kind of code, but the number of specialists who excel in it are few and far between. On the Web, those who have advanced coding skills in this specialty can command top salaries in roles as diverse as CIOs, eCommerce managers, information architects, Web designers and usability consultants.

What code are we talking about? The English language. Or any language, for that matter.

Our written language is a code, and it is one of the most challenging codes for Web site developers to master, whether we speak about it as “editorial,” “Webitorial”, “digital text”, or simply “eText” for purposes of this article. We may as well consider eText to be alphanumeric as well, because much of our language and what we consider textual includes alphabetic characters as well as numeric characters and various ascii-type symbols.

The three facets of eText

eText content on the Web is one of the most technically layered forms of content because it is actually several things at once:

* eText is Code – It originates in a formal language; it has substantive meaning, it is used for communication; it is subject to interpretation; and it has affective and symbolic meaning;

* eText is Object – It is visual and spatial, appearing as blocks of text, chunks of text, text documents, text logos and text advertisements (promotional text);

* eText is Design – It is recognizable in many different designs and formats, whether through fonts, spacing, styles, colors and other attributes of design. If a picture paints a thousand words, then a picture of a word must paint a million nuances, meanings and subtexts. Each word has a literal, symbolic, cultural and contextual meaning; and the way it is handled as an object and as a design can affect the way it is communicated and the way it is received.

Is there any wonder that eText is one of the least understood and most poorly engineered forms of content on the Internet? So many people who are charged with authoring, editing, designing or otherwise manipulating eText have never been trained to work with its threefold qualities of Code, Object and Design. Those who are writing experts with a strong command of the subtleties of language often do not understand how to handle text as an object on a Web page or as an aesthetic element in a Web design. Those who understand how to design and layout eText for the Web often lack the skills to understand how language can be shaped for substance and symbolism.

That's not to say that you can't engineer eText content without expertise in all its aspects; process-driven content management allows many specialists to work with content and develop it properly for a Web environment; a writer can author the eText, a designer can design it and a Web publisher or Web information designer can shape it for the site so that it works most effectively. The development process, however, should not obscure the fact that, like all digital content, when you change one aspect, it alters the others. This is one of the reasons Web sites created and managed by perfectly competent and even talented staff can end up confusing, unintelligible and unusable. A writer writes in isolation, and doesn't have any input about how the eText will appear when published online; or a designer is handed a Word document but admonished not to make any changes to it for any reason; or a Web editor is faced with either having to change what the author and designer have done, or leave it as it is with minimal changes.

Are we making content re-cyclable — or disposable?

One of the most practical yet ultimately counter-productive trends is toward the re-use of content, which usually means structuring eText content so that each chunk of data in it and each aspect of it can be extracted from its original form and redeployed in another context using dynamic publishing. This reductionist approach essentially treats the code of language as simply a quantifiable mass of data that can be carved up without losing any intrinsic value, i.e. the sum of its parts is greater than the whole. While this may work at a practical level for organizations attempting to 1) improve quicker and easier access to content for different users in different contexts, and 2) extract the maximum value from existing content rather than having to constantly reinvent the wheel with new content, recycling content actually makes it more disposable. It mechanizes human communication and it mutes or eliminates its human complexities and shadings. It's the equivalent of the “voice to speech” software: you can make your PC speak words with a human-sounding voice, but the effect is in human and lacking in originality, nuance, emotion or spontaneity.

What makes eText different than other codes is the human element. eText engineering is not about the automation of language or about turning it into soulless digital output, as practical as that may seem when content managers are trying to find efficiencies for their sites. eText specialists are, by necessity, professionals who have a more sophisticated understanding of how eText moves, motivates, engages, impels and even challenges other human beings.

(Garth A. Buchholz, B.A., C.U.A. is a Canadian author, Web content strategist and Certified Usability Analyst.)

According to Information Week

Google Upgrades Desktop Software
In moves that "amount to a new operating system," according to a Gartner analyst, the company is introducing a different way of organizing, finding, and sharing information.

Wikipedia has been in the news recently, most seriously as the result of a claim that an anonymous 'editor' had presented false information about one John Seigenthaler - a former aide to Edward Kennedy. The suggestion was made that Seigenthaler had some role in the assassination of Kennedy. Wikipedia has edited out that material and now carries a brief account of the issue. Seigenthaler has written about the problem, suggesting that Wikipedia's lack of any control over the submission of text means that it cannot be a trusted information source. For a source such as Wikipedia, which has several hundred thousand entries and is visited by millions daily, this is a serious issue. The fact that the false information was discovered is, perhaps, justification of the view that 'open' editing works, but the article was available for months and had been repeated in two other sources, so how long is it before false or erroneous information on less notable persons or issues is discovered? In some case perhaps never.

In another case, one of the leading figures in the development of 'podcasting' edited the article on the subject to remove information about another person who was instrumental in developing the concept, thereby giving himself a bigger role than might have been justified.

I guess that Wikipedia is going to have to introduce better control over the submission of information—it is not for nothing that scholarly journals have peer review.

The State of Masachusetts is not the only place in the news in relation to open source - I see that the City of Paris is leading France into the open source future.

I've seen a number reports on this topic, but perhaps the best is the BBC World item. It seems that the Republic of Macedonia (one needs to be specific to avoid confusion with the Greek region of Macedonia) is implementing a country-wide wi-fi network, funded, in part by USAID. The agency has invested in implementing broadband connection in the country's schools and the aim is to use these centres as nodes for further development.

Just drawn to my attention by a mailing from Gerry McKiernan is an article in DLib Magazine, in two parts, on "social bookmarking" - a very comprehensive piece from staff at the Nature Publishing Group. [Click here for Part II.]

The death of Peter Drucker on Friday at the age of 95 removes from the scene one of the few management writers who could write well and coherently and with enormous depth of experience. The fact that he survived so long as a major figure, while other, more faddish writers have come and gone, is testament to his worth.

Drucker's death hit the news around the world:

• Peter F. Drucker, a Pioneer in Social and Management Theory, Is Dead at 95
• Management Visionary Peter Drucker Dies
• Peter Drucker, Considered Greatest Management Guru, Dies at 95
• Peter Drucker, pioneer of social responsibility, dies
• US management visionary Peter Drucker dies at 95

The new issue will be available on the Website tomorrow. Here's the Editorial:

Introduction

Getting out the first issue of the new volume - which really signals that ten years have now gone by since Information Research first hit cyberspace - has been rather fraught. My Internet connection has been playing up for the past month or so, with first, intermittent disconnection developing into intermittent connection and finally no connection at all. Eventually, after a couple of weeks talking to my ISP help desk, then tests by BT of the ADSL line, only the router was left as the likely source of the problem. So, now it is en route back to Netgear and I'm using the modem that came with the ISP subscription.

The interruptions to service and the time taken in diagnosing the problem have meant that some papers that should have been published in this issue will have to wait until January - my apologies to the authors. Also, at this point, not all of the papers on the site have been properly proof-read; I simply wasn't able to get them to Rae-Ann so that she could do the proofing. Of course, one of the advantages of electronic publication is that we can correct the papers at any time and we shall do so as time goes by. No doubt, however, there are other errors lurking in the system somewhere: if you come across any, do let me know.

In this issue

We have the usual multi-national contributions to this issue, with papers from Greece, Hungary, Spain, Sweden, and the USA. From Sweden, we have a second paper from AnnBritt Enochsson on the use of the Internet by children; from Hungary a study of environmental scanning by companies in Western Europe and, coincidentally, another paper on environmental scanning by Greek companies from a Greek research, Liana Kourteli; and, if that was not enough on the subject, yet another, from the USA on environmental scanning by clinicians in substance abuse treatment clinics. Perhaps this ought to have been a special issue on environmental scanning. Finally, we have a couple of papers in Spanish: one on the extent to which academics at the University of Murcia publish in the international journals, and the other on a scientometric study of academic collaboration by researchers at the Universidad Politécnica de Valencia.

It is interesting to note that the papers in Spanish that have been published in Information Research are 'hit' to just about the same extent as the papers in English. This makes me wonder why more scholarly journals are not multilingual. I can understand the problems of accomplishing it, of course, especially for print-on-paper journals, but for open access journals (i.e., true open access, not author-charged) the costs are minimal when collaboration with colleagues abroad is so easily accomplished. The multilingual (or, more correctly, bilingual) character of Information Research surely encourages more native English speakers who understand Spanish to read these papers, while Spanish speakers get the opportunity at least to read the abstracts of the English papers in Spanish, even if they are not sufficiently bilingual to read the entire paper.

Finally...

Readers of the reviews (and I understand that there are some of you out there who are more likely to read these than any of the papers!) will notice a not too subtle change with this issue. Information Research has become an Amazon Associate. Each review now carries a link to an Amazon site, enabling you to buy the book reviewed immediately - whether for yourself or for your organization. If you do click on the links to Amazon, the journal gets a small payment for each book bought, thereby helping us to keep the journal going.

I'm also experimenting with Google: initially, you'll find a search box at the end of the reference list on each paper with the search terms already entered. Just click on search and you'll be presented (on a new page) with output of a search on Scholar Google. Let me know if you think it is a good idea.

Thanks to Charles Knight for drawing my attention to an article about the beta version of the new Microsoft Hotmail. Personally, I would no more think of using Hotmail than I would think of jumping into a vat of molten lead, since it is such an horrendous spam attractor and the article doesn't address that problem. The author suggests that the beta points to an e-mail system that will be better than GMail, with which it obviously competes, but I don't see it, myself. The three vertical panes of the layout look very clumsy and poorly designed.

Some time ago Chris Kuelzow of Zybic Inc. contacted me for permission to put 'The nonsense of knowledge management' on his company's site and he contacted me again recently to tell me about another document.

Zybic Inc. is an information management company with an interesting product, Enterprise ZE, which is based on decomposing business activity into a number of intelligible units and linking all information 'entities' (documents, e-mail messages, spreadsheets, etc.) to these units. That's a crude representation of the idea, and you can read much more about it in a Zybic 'white paper'.

Last month I put out a message about 'Introducing Information Management', edited by Macevičiūtė and Wilson - which has now been issued, so I trust that your orders are in :-)

Yesterday brought another new book in the mail, 'Theories of Information Behavior', edited by Fisher, Erdelez and McKechnie, which has a contribution from me - along with more than 80 others. This is another 'good cause' book, with the proceeds going to support SIG/USE and to provide grants for conference attendance, etc. So your hard-earned cash will be put to good use!

I have just finished reading a brilliant book - a wonderful work of imagination, 'The piano tuner' by Daniel Mason. Quite apart from its literary quality, the book has an interesting 'sub-text' on the nature of official information. In the following, the speakers are, first, Dr. Carroll, Surgeon-Major in the Shan States of Burma towards the end of the 19th century, the second is the piano tuner, Edgar Drake:

'I know what the reports say.' He lit the cigar. 'If you read closely, you would know that the Indian Opium Act of 1878 prohibited the growing of opium in Burma proper; at the time we did not control the Shan States. This doesn't mean that there isn't pressure to stop. There is much more fuss about it in England than here, which is probably why so many of... us... who write the reports, are selective in what they say.'

'That makes me worry about everything else I have read.'

'I wouldn't. Most of what is written is true, although you will have to get used to the subtleties, to the differences between what you read in England and what you see here, especially anything to do with politics.'

Many years ago I read John Johnson's PhD thesis, 'The social construction of official information', and frequently thereafter recommended it to students as an example of what qualitative research can achieve when it is done well. It is necessary for all of us to remember that no official information, of any kind, is value free, or free from subjectivism, and when we read official reports on such things as the recent flooding of New Orleans, it will be wise to look for what isn't reported, as well as what is.

Dr. Elena Maceviciute and I have been engaged for the last few months in preparing a reader on information management from contributions originally published by Information Research. All of the papers have been revised (and, in some cases, completely rewritten by the authors. Details can be found on the Facet Publishing Website.

Contributors have waived payment for their work and royalties from the book will go to Lund University Libraries to support their work in hosting the journal.

So - if you want to support a good cause, make sure your library buys a copy!

MOBIS 2005 takes place in Leeds in December. This is an IFIP "working conference" (I'm not quite sure what other kind of conference there is!) devoted to the application of mobile technologies to information systems and information delivery. You can find all about it at the conference Website.

The current issue of Training and Development Journal (register to access some of the content)has an article on 'knowledge management' - a quote:

Knowledge management is “generally considered a failed initiative,” suggests Larry Moyer, a performance consultant at EDS. “It is one of those management tricks of the month.”
Moyer suggests that it’s probably not a good idea to put knowledge management on your résumé. “That doesn’t mean that it has gone away or that it should go away. It is being incorporated into a much larger and much more appropriate discussion around the issues of performance support and performance improvements,” explains Moyer. “How do we support our worker both through training and posttraining activities?”

The term "information fluency" has appeared on a few web sites, with the suggestion that this is a "better" term that "information literacy" - because the latter might be regarded as discriminatory. Setting aside whatever "discriminatory" might mean in this context, is "information fluency" an acceptable term? Being fluent in a language I can understand -- but fluent in information?

I thought a little non-serious questionnaire analysis might amuse you - I'm in the process of a rough and ready analysis of the questionnaires returned by readers of Information Research and three of the questions generated some interesting responses. Well, actually, they are all interesting, otherwise I wouldn't have asked them, would I?

However, the three I have in mind tonight are those that asked for the 'most interesting paper', the paper that had been 'most useful recently', and which paper would get 'the best paper award'.

Naturally, there is just about as much variety as there are responses, and the first thing to note is that, in general, people didn't respond to these questions: 39 non-respondents to the first, 45 to the second, and 60 to the third—out of about 90 analysed to date.

Of those selected as 'the most interesting', the following attracted more than two votes:

• Brooks-Web search: how the Web has changed information-paper 154
• Heinstrom-Five personality dimensions and their influence on information behaviour-paper 165
• Wilson-The Nonsense of Knowledge Management-paper 144

Of those selected as 'the most useful', the following attracted more than two votes:

• Dervin-Human studies and user studies-paper166
• Franklin and Plum-Library usage patterns in the electronic information environment-paper 187
• Heinstrom-Five personality dimensions-paper165
• Jarvelin and Ingwersen-Information seeking research needs extension-paper 212

Of those selected for the 'best paper award', the following attracted more than two votes:

• Miller-I=0-paper140
• Wilson-The Nonsense of Knowledge Management-paper144

What does it all mean? Well, I guess there's some correlation between the number of hits a paper gets and the probability of it being selected, and that choice will be dictated by current concerns and interests. But, looking at the list, I think that they are all pretty good papers :-)

I've just noticed something rather interesting about the hits on papers in Information Research. According to the page counter, the most hit paper in Volume 8 No. 2, with 3,371 hits is in Spanish:

Judith Licea de Arenas, Emma Santillan- Rivero, Miguel Arenas, and Javier Valles Desempeño de becarios Mexicanos en la producción de conocimiento cientifico ¿de la bibliometria a la politica cientifica?<

This would seem to provide at least some justification for my decision to publish papers in Spanish which, according to one source, has the same number of speakers as a native tongue as does English - 322,000,000 The only question is why other journals that regard themselves as "international" in scope feel that it is necessary to restrict themselves (and their readers) to English?

Ideally, of course, the journal ought also to be published in Chinese and if there is anyone out there who would like to set up a mirror site in China, please get in touch.

The Weblog

It seems that my suspicions about the lack of general interest in the IR Weblog are confirmed :-) I've been contributing very little over the past month and so far no one has asked, Where are you?

New issue of the journal

The latest issue, Volume 10 No. 1, is now on the site. This one has the first batch of papers from the Information Seeking in Context conference, held in Dublin last month. The other half will be published in the January 2005 issue. I finally got round to checking on what logs were available on the server and discovered that, since, the 8th October (which is when the analysis software appears to have kicked in) there have been about 280,000 hits on the InformationR.net site - most of which are on the journal. This is considerably beyond my own estimates from the various counters. InformationR.net is the sixth most 'popular' virtual domain on the University's servers.

Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP)

VoIP appears to be building up nicely. I finally got round to using it, along with colleagues in the AIMTech research group at Leeds University Business School. The voice quality, using Skype, is generally pretty good - not quite as good as the best landline, but good enough considering that it's free. I've also tried the SkypeOut service, which connects to landline numbers pretty well anywhere in the world and to mobile phones in some. You can connect to landlines in Western Europe, North America, Australia and New Zealand for 1.7 Euro cents a minute (£0.0118 or $0.02129) - mobiles cost a good deal more. Connection with landlines can be variable - sometimes connection is lost and in one case there was no voice connection at all. No doubt, with the interest being expressed, these problems will get ironed out.

Of course, governments and the big telecomms companies get very edgy over VoIP - here's a communication process where they may not be able to make any money, unless they REGULATE. Naturally, it is the USA where these concerns are raised.

It had to happen: "Boingo, Vonage Sign VoWi-Fi Pact"

Google again

A couple of things about Google - first, you'll find a review of its e-mail service, Gmail, in the latest issue of the journal. Secondly, I'm also trying out its 'desktop search' program - this enables you to do a Google search on your hard disc. It also checks your hard disc when you do a Web search - useful for bringing to your attention those items you'd forgotten you'd ever written!

It is very interesting to see how the discussion on the non-existance of KM
is evolving.

However I would like to make a few nuances. The arguments why KM failed are
applicable on ALL other hypes.

1) not really understanding the issue and impact of the 'starters'/theory of
the hype
2) claims of other disciplines/domains of success
3) technology suppliers misusing the hype for commercial purpose

What is the sustaining aspect of Business Process Redesign (BPR)? The
arguments and theory were interesting but in reality a couple of consultants
come in your organisation, mess up your organisation, find out that it
doesn't work how they constructed it on the drawing table and leave. But
nowadays organisations are still changing their way of working and
re-inventing and improving their processes due to (f.e.) the economic
situation, and they always did and always will. Nothing new.

What is the sustaining aspect of Business Intelligence (BI)? Interesting
theory but in reality a database vendor comes in your organisation to sell
you a database (we will put everyting in and give you your market
intelligence and a competitive advantage, yeah sure...) and then leaves
because he cannot solve the problem (carbage in, carbage out he says). But
even now we need 'up to date' information on our performance and
intelligence on our markets and competitor's, we always did and always will,
nothing new.

What is the sustaining aspect of Customer Relationship Management (CRM)?
Interesting that if we know our customer and build a relationship we can
cross sell and up sell, but in reality a vendor or consultant comes in and
sell's you a database with a Call Center Script ("Can I help you with
something else than I just did? For example a car insurance sir?"). And
after a while we find out that real customer intimacy cannot be realized
over the phone or the internet. Putting time and effort in building and
maintaining a relationship with your customer is something that IS
important, but the grocer on the corner already does it over decades, he
always did and he always will. Nothing new.

The issue is that we can go on and on discussing whether KM failed or not,
but beleave me: it did not even exist. Like the other hypes it has been
misinterpreted, claimed by other domains and misused by technology vendors.
The reason why people don't share there knowledge is simple, because
knowledge is power and our organisational structures don't facilitate or
stimulate knowledge sharing. Managers still use the red pencil (cost
cutting) and look for short term solutions that are stimulating their
(financial) situation. Creating a knowledge friendly culture is a long term
project and is not interesting for managers and besides, it cannot be
measured (how can you measure a better solution based on more information?
what is the cost of a retired expert? what does re-inventing the wheel cost?
and so on). See how Anders Moberg is solving Ahold's (a large grocer with
heavy financial problems and some scandals in the past) problems in the
Netherlands : they lay off thousands of employees, sell companies and they
issue new shares/stocks. Quite knowledge friendly, what about our people are
our most important asset?

Why did this KM hype start? Because (a.o.):

- people are reinventing the wheel, (this is expensive and time consuming)
- our society is becoming more knowledge intensive (products are complexer,
time to market is shorter, the value of a company is no longer based on
tangibles but more intangibles)
- we have less people to do the work (ageing of the society)

The professor in the article has studied so called KM success stories, I
agree on the outcome but I really don't need a study to conclude the same.
What I would like to see is a study on companies that disappeared due to
lack of managing their intellectual assets. Any idea why March 1st
(consultancy firm, thousands of employees) went bankrupt in a couple of
months....? I think it would be interesting to see what the common
denominator is of organisations with success and companies with failues, it
might be how they handle information and create and maintain a knowledge
friendly culture and infrastructure...

After we are done arguing that knowledge management failed we will find out
that knowledge was important and it will always be, nothing new.

And on your last remark Tom, very funny, last week I was confronted with a
manager that stated: "Knowledge Management is gone, all the issues of the
hype are becoming 'common practice'". So common sense management here we
come!

Best regards to all!
Wido Bosch

My thanks to Bob Robinson for drawing my attention to a feature in today's Financial Times, which is fortunately openly available on the Website. It's an article by Michael Earl, Professor of information management at the University of Oxford, called Tantalised by the promise of wisdom. In it he notes:

Yet nearly 15 years on, the promise of knowledge management has yet to be realised. There is a dearth of outstanding success stories, where original goals were achieved or sustainable value was created.

It is not unusual to visit companies claiming knowledge management successes only to find some worthy efforts lacking any lasting impact. More often, a company has simply relabelled a new IT application as a knowledge management initiative.

In a 1998 article in the Sloan Management Review, I reported on the work of 20 chief knowledge officers at large corporations. Sceptics may not be surprised to know that most of these CKO positions no longer exist. More than half had gone within two years of our study. In other words, knowledge management is tantalising. It still appeals to many, but success is elusive. Even defining it is not easy. Perhaps this is because knowledge management is concerned with an intangible and, in some ways, invisible asset.

He describes a study of forty companies, through which seven schools of knowledge management were identified: the 'systems' school, the 'cartographic' school, the 'engineering' the 'commercial' school, the 'organisational' school, the 'spatial' school and the 'strategic' school. He also terms the first three, technology oriented and the last three, behavioural. I'll leave it to you to explore the article for the detail.

The article is relatively brief, so one does not expect close analysis of the schools; that may be in whatever paper is published on the research. However, it is notable that the first three are all, in essence, information management schools, involving databases and/or intranets, the 'commercial' school is concerned with intellectual property rights and intangible assets, and the first two 'behavioural' schools are all about sharing information within the organization, while the 'strategic school' is about defining the business as a knowledge business - which is, perhaps, closer to the 'commercial' school than to the other two 'behavioural' schools.

The reasons for the disappearance of the CKOs are interesting:

Our study of CKOs revealed broadly skilled people with loose job descriptions and CVs rich with experience. They were usually appointed by the chief executive but had to define their own role and work out the company's agenda for knowledge management. Their roles combined the skills of an entrepreneur, consultant, technologist and designer. Most did not keep their job for long, often due to a change of CEO, sometimes because an early victory was declared over knowledge management or because they were headhunted by management consultancies.

I wonder when we're going to hear about 'common-sense management'?

Having recently published a new issue of Information Research, I thought it was time to find out how the ranking by 'hits per month' was standing. So here's the latest table. We see that some very recent papers appear to have struck a chord, while some of the oldest papers are still going strong.

T.D. Wilson The nonsense of knowledge management      Issue 8.1 Total hits 39553 Months active 24 Hits per month 1648.04

Terrence A. Brooks The nature of meaning in the age of Google      Issue 9.3 Total hits 5204 Months active 4 Hits per month 1301.00

Jannica Heinström Five personality dimensions and their influence on information behaviour       Issue 9.1 Total hits 9090 Months active 9 Hits per month 1010.00

P. Riding, S.P. Fowell, and P.C.M. Levy An action research approach to curriculum development      Issue 1.1 Total hits 16507 Months active 19 Hits per month 868.79

Chun Wei Choo Environmental scanning as information seeking and organizational learning      Issue 7.1 Total hits 19950 Months active 33 Hits per month 604.55

France Bouthillier and Kathleen Shearer Understanding knowledge management and information management: the need for an empirical perspective       Issue 8.1 Total hits 12594 Months active 21 Hits per month 599.71

Zita Correia and Tom Wilson Scanning the business environment for information: a grounded theory approach      Issue 2.4 Total hits 11000 Months active 19 Hits per month 578.95

Paul M. Hildreth and Chris Kimble The duality of knowledge       Issue 8.1 Total hits 11984 Months active 21 Hits per month 570.67

Kalervo Järvelin and T.D. Wilson On conceptual models for information seeking and retrieval research       Issue 9.1 Total hits 4819 Months active 9 Hits per month 535.44

Terrence A. Brooks Web search: how the Web has changed information retrieval.      Issue 8.3 Total hits 7452 Months active 15 Hits per month 496.80

V. Mistry and Bob Usherwood Total quality management, British Standard accreditation, Investors in People and academic libraries      Issue 1.3 Total hits 9414 Months active 19 Hits per month 495.47

Maija-Leena Huotari and T.D. Wilson Determining organizational information needs: the Critical Success Factors approach      Issue 6.3 Total hits 18498 Months active 39 Hits per month 474.31

Sirje Virkus Information literacy in Europe: a literature review      Issue 8.4 Total hits 5152 Months active 12 Hits per month 429.33

Kirsti Nilsen The Library Visit Study: user experiences at the virtual reference desk      Issue 9.2 Total hits 2312 Months active 6 Hits per month 385.33

Barbara Niedźwiedzka A proposed general model of information behaviour      Issue 9.1 Total hits 3021 Months active 9 Hits per month 335.67

Joyce Kirk Information in organisations: directions for information management      Issue 4.3 Total hits 20602 Months active 63 Hits per month 327.02

Leonard J. Ponzi and Michael Koenig Knowledge management: another management fad?      Issue 8.1 Total hits 6826 Months active 21 Hits per month 325.05

Shrianjani Marie (Gina) de Alwis and Susan Ellen Higgins Information as a tool for management decision making: a case study of Singapore      Issue 7.1 Total hits 10054 Months active 33 Hits per month 304.67

Wallace Koehler A longitudinal study of Web pages continued: a consideration of document persistence      Issue 9.2 Total hits 1797 Months active 6 Hits per month 299.50

Bo-Christer Björk Open access to scientific publications - an analysis of the barriers to change      Issue 9.2 Total hits 1776 Months active 6 Hits per month 296.00