Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
  1. Home
  2. Publications
  3. Publishing partners
  4. Facet Publishing
  5. Content Listing

Refine listing

Refine listing

Access:
Content type:
Publication date:
Apply   From and To filters
Subject: Show more
Journals Show more
Publishers: Show more
Societies Show more
Series: Show more
Collections: Show more

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
Cancel
×

6023 results in Facet Publishing

Page 252 of 302

  • 10 - Co-creation of the Grateful Dead sound archive: control, access and curation communities

  • from Part 4 - Online communities: how technology brings communities and their records together
    • By David A. Wallace, Lecturer IV and Research Investigator at the School of Information, University of Michigan
  • Edited by Jeannette A. Bastian, Ben Alexander
  • Book:
    Community Archives
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    01 November 2009, pp 169-194

  • Summary

    A lot of what we are selling is community. That is our main product …

    Band lyricist John Perry Barlow, quoted in McNally, 2002, 386

    Introduction

    The Grateful Dead (‘Dead’) represents a 30-year travelling experiment in improvisational music and audience-band co-creation. Between 1965 and 1995 the band performed over 36,000 songs during 2317 concerts in nearly 300 cities. Beyond band member commitment, the Dead's longevity and yield also resulted from the loyalty of an ever-expanding base of supporters (‘Deadheads’) who symbiotically fuelled the band's renowned creative process. Hand in glove with this performative arc was the creation of ‘two’ complementary archives of enormous size, scope and distribution: the band's official recordings, and a much larger body of permitted and illicit in-concert audience recordings. Over the decades the band was forced to evolve its position on audience recordings. Initial disinterest and hostility gave way to a tentative acceptance, and finally to the sanctioning of an ‘Official Taper's Section’ (OTS) in 1984.

    Early audience recordings were made on reel-to-reel tapes and traded hand-to-hand and through the postal system. These humble beginnings sparked ever-expanding systems of reproduction through sharing that occurred alongside the shift from analogue to digital to network technologies. All contributed to an aggregated-disaggregated taper and trader community that was in full flourish when the band disintegrated in 1995 with the death of co-founder Jerry Garcia. The rise of the internet and the world wide web caused and continues to cause seismic shifts in the scale, availability, reproduction and curation of the band's formal and informal sound archive. Nearly 15 years after the band's demise, the ongoing voluntary efforts of the taping and trading community ensure unprecedented access to performances and their metadata.

    This chapter charts the history and continuing evolution of the taping and trading community, now in its fifth decade. It briefly describes the band's performance philosophy and the taping and trading sub-culture it triggered within the broader Deadhead community. A discussion of the band's institutional audio recording and archiving is followed by a more detailed analysis of the taping and trading community and its practices. This leads to an examination of the revolutionary impact of the internet and the world wide web on trading, documentation and curation.

  • Appendix 2 - Where to go for further information

  • Sheila Pantry, Peter Griffiths
  • Book:
    How to Give Your Users the LIS Services They Want
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    01 November 2009, pp 173-186

  • Summary

    Professional bodies

    The following list includes brief descriptions, contact details and other information about a range of national and international professional bodies that can help to provide you with relevant news and research that will keep your knowledge and skills up to date. A number of them provide access to their professional resources and publishing, either selectively or by providing free access after a period of time (typically 2–3 years after publication). Members may have additional access, for example, CILIP members are provided with electronic access to a range of professional journals through Emerald, and to two refereed journals, which are hosted by Sage.

    UK

    Aslib, The Association for Information Management

    207 Davina House

    137–49 Goswell Road

    London EC1V 7ET

    Tel: +44 (0) 20 7253 3349

    Fax: +44 (0) 20 7490 0577

    E-mail: aslib@aslib.com

    www.aslib.co.uk

    Offers corporate, affiliate and student membership and group and branches that form an international network of information professionals in every sector of the information world.

    Publications include: Journal of Documentation, Aslib Proceedings, Program (available through the Emerald aggregation platform www.emeraldinsight.com), Managing Information (www. managinginformation.com).

    Offers Aslib Management Knowledge Resource, a tailored version of Emerald ManagementFirst website designed to meet the needs of Aslib's corporate members.

    British Library (BL)

    St Pancras

    96 Euston Road

    London NW1 2DB

    Tel: +44 (0) 870 444 1500

    E-mail: Customer-Services@bl.uk

    www.bl.uk

    The British Library (BL)

    Boston Spa

    Wetherby

    West Yorkshire LS23 7BQ

    British Library Newspapers

    Colindale Avenue

    London NW9 5HE

    There is an extensive list of specific contact details at www.bl.uk/aboutus/contact/index.html.

  • Appendix 1 - Reading list and references

  • Sheila Pantry, Peter Griffiths
  • Book:
    How to Give Your Users the LIS Services They Want
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    01 November 2009, pp 137-172

  • Summary

    Chapter 1 Why this book?

    CIBER (2008) Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future [executive summary], University College London, www.ucl.ac.uk/infostudies/research/ciber/downloads/ggexecutive. pdf.

    Nicholas, D. and Rowlands, I. (eds) (2008) Digital Consumers: reshaping the information professions, Facet Publishing, ISBN 978-1-85604-651-0.

    OCLC (2006) College Students’ Perceptions of the Libraries and Information Resources: a report to the OCLC membership, Online Computer Library Center.

    Shirky, C. (2008) Every Piece of Information is a Latent Community: Online 2008, address. Given 2 December 2008 at Olympia Grand Hall, London, UK, http://theshiftedlibrarian.com/archives/2008/12/02/clay-shirkeyonline-information-keynote.html.

    Verlejs, J. (1988) Information Seeking: basing services on users’ behaviour, McFarland, ISBN 978-0-89950254-0.

    Chapter 2 Understanding users – the what, why, where, when, how and who

    Bawden, D. and Vilar, P. (2006) Digital Libraries: to meet or manage user expectations, Aslib Proceedings, 58 (4), 346–54.

    Björneborn, L. (2006) Libraries as Integrative Interfaces –tracking users’ information interaction in context, Royal School of Library and Information Science, Copenhagen, Denmark, Working paper, version 3.

    This working paper outlines an ongoing exploratory research project concerned with how users interact with the physical interior of public libraries.

    CIBER (2008) Information Behaviour of the Researcher of the Future [executive summary], University College London, www.ucl.ac.uk/infostudies/research/ciber/downloads/ggexecutive.pdf.

    Curzon, S. C. (2006) Managing Change: a how-to-do-it manual for librarians, Facet Publishing, ISBN 978-1-85604-601-5.

    Dempsey, L. (2006) The (Digital) Library Environment: ten years after, Ariadne, 46 (February), www.ariadne.ac.uk/issue46/dempsey/. Dempsey, L. (2008, 2009) Always On: libraries in a world of permanent connectivity. In Needham, G. and Ally, M. (eds) M-libraries: libraries on the move to provide virtual access, Facet Publishing, xxv–lii; slightly revised version published in First Monday, 14 (1–5), January 2009, http://firstmonday.org/htbin/cgiwrap/bin/ojs/index.php/fm/article/viewArticle/2291/2070.

    Dorner, D. G. and Gorman, G. E. (2010) Analysing What Your Users Need: a guide for librarians and information managers, Facet Publishing, ISBN 978-1-85604-484-4 (in press).

    Ealing Library and Information Service (1995) [Evidence to the DNH Public Library Review], http://panizzi.shef.ac.uk/library-review/london/ealin.html.

    Frand, J. (2006) The Information Mindset: changes in students and implications for higher education, EDUCAUSE Review, March/April, 15.

    Hyams, E. (2001) Nursing the Evidence: The Royal College of Nursing information strategy, Library Association Record, 103 (12), 747–9.

  • 6 - The sociological turn in information science

  • Edited by Alan Gilchrist
  • Book:
    Information Science in Transition
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    30 April 2009, pp 109-128

  • Summary

    Abstract

    This paper explores the history of ‘the social’ in information science. It traces the influence of social scientific thinking on the development of the field's intellectual base. The continuing appropriation of both theoretical and methodological insights from domains such as social studies of science, science and technology studies, and socio-technical systems is discussed.

    Introduction: an inter-discipline?

    I first published in the Journal of Information Science (JIS) in 1980 [1]. My gossamer paper – that was how I described it to the then editor – most certainly did not set the world alight, nor did it languish in the capacious dustbin of the uncited, though, truth be told, it probably deserved such a fate. ‘Some reflections on citation habits in psychology’ was a (very) brief communication containing three references, one of which was to Jack Meadows’ estimable book, Communication in Science [2]. The two other cited works were articles in American Psychologist and Social Studies of Science. It seems appropriate, this being the Ruby anniversary that never was, to take as my starting point that first foray into print with the official organ of the late lamented Institute of Information Scientists (IIS); doubly so, given that it was, in retrospect at least, an early indicator of my long-standing interest in the intersection of information science and social scientific thinking and practice.

    For almost three decades I have been reading and drawing upon the literature of the social and behavioral sciences, specifically sociology of science, science and technology studies (STS) and, more recently, the somewhat amorphous domain of social informatics. By way of illustration, many of the references in both my earliest and most recent books, The Citation Process [3] and The Hand of Science [4], are to monographs and articles sourced from these and cognate fields. It strikes me as inconceivable that the issues which define the sub-fields of information science in which I primarily work – scholarly communication, citation analysis, scientometrics – could have evolved and matured to the extent they have without appropriating insights, both theoretical and methodological, from the social sciences, not least of which is sociology.

  • Preface

  • Edited by Alan Gilchrist
  • Book:
    Information Science in Transition
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    30 April 2009, pp xv-xvi

  • Summary

    Why publish a monograph of papers that have already appeared in journal format? There are two answers to that question: the first is that the previous publication, which constituted a special issue of the Journal of Information Science, was so well received that it was thought to be both useful and permissible to broadcast the contents to a wider readership; and second, but less importantly, those libraries that already subscribe to the Journal may find it convenient to be able to shelve the monograph separately.

    The special issue was first published in 2008 to commemorate the founding of the UK Institute of Information Scientists fifty years previously. Its aim was to review a wide range of topics under the broad banner of information science, showing how the core concepts had evolved to the point where, as Jack Meadows says in his paper, ‘…information science activities developed over the past 50 years have triumphed, but information science as a separate activity may be on the wane. If so, its final epitaph might well be that of Sir Christopher Wren in St Paul's Cathedral: “If you want a monument, look around you”’. In fact, as traditional information science increasingly merges with information technology, the word ‘informatics’ is coming back into fashion and ‘information sciences’ are referred to in the plural. Institutions come and go, but even as the web-dominated information world evolves there is still much to be learnt from the past.

    Information Science in Transition is an exact reproduction of the original papers, and there is only one minor correction to be made. The Editorial stated that Jason Farradane, co-founder of the Institute, was a Polish immigrant. In fact, it was his father who emigrated to England, and Jason was born in Hampstead.

    I should like to record my thanks to Facet Publishing and Helen Carley for producing this publication.

  • 4 - On the history of evaluation in IR

  • Edited by Alan Gilchrist
  • Book:
    Information Science in Transition
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    30 April 2009, pp 63-94

  • Summary

    Abstract

    This paper is a personal take on the history of evaluation experiments in information retrieval. It describes some of the early experiments that were formative in our understanding, and goes on to discuss the current dominance of TREC (the Text REtrieval Conference) and to assess its impact.

    Introduction

    The foundation of the Institute of Information Scientists in the UK in 1958 coincides closely with the beginning of the notion of experimental evaluation of information retrieval systems. Although there had been some earlier attempts, we usually mark the start of the tradition as the Cranfield experiments, which ran from 1958 to 1966. Information retrieval is commonly regarded as a core component of information science, and systematic empirical evaluation of IR systems probably represents the strongest claim that information science can make to being a science in any traditional sense. There is a nice irony here: the founder of the empirical tradition in IR, the Cranfield librarian Cyril Cleverdon, was not at all a supporter of the Institute. But more of this anon.

    As for the present, and despite the concerns of the founders of the Institute, academic information science is now quite closely associated with the former library schools, many of which have adopted titles which include the word ‘information’. However, a lot of current work in IR, theoretical and experimental, takes place elsewhere, mainly in computer science departments, though several other academic domains are represented. It probably comes as a considerable surprise to a current PhD student, working on (say) a machine learning optimization technique applied to search engine ranking, that he or she is in thrall to an experimental tradition founded by a librarian, working with card indexes, a half-century ago.

    Thus the history that is the subject of this paper is not too readily defined in terms of institutional or academic boundaries – or national ones. Despite this, it can be seen as a remarkably coherent development of a set of principles and methods. Like all academic subjects it generates argument and disagreement and heated disputation, but there remains a relatively stable common core, which has, despite its limitations (I will argue), served us well over the last 50 years. Furthermore, while its present international status developed out of a US dominance for a large part of that period, the strength of the UK contribution has been remarkable.

  • 11 - Information policies: yesterday, today, tomorrow

  • Edited by Alan Gilchrist
  • Book:
    Information Science in Transition
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    30 April 2009, pp 249-282

  • Summary

    Abstract

    This article presents a brief history of the development of ideas about national and organizational information policies, from the first establishment of a UK Ministry of Information in the First World War to the present day. The issues and tensions that have characterized attempts to develop and implement policies on the national and organizational scale are discussed, with particular reference to: the power relations between the parties to them; the relative significance accorded to information technology and information content; the transition from formulating policy to acting on it; and the threats to the survival of those policies that get as far as implementation. In conclusion, the contribution to date of information science to the theory and practice of information policies is assessed, and suggestions are offered on directions for future efforts, in the light of the past of this interesting field.

    Introduction

    I have to begin this article with a confession: up till now, I have always avoided writing about national information policies. Over the years, I have read much of what others have written on the subject and admired a good deal of it; but in my own work I have concentrated on trying to help organizations to develop information policies for themselves, by working with them and writing for them. It offers some chance of producing at least some visible effect within a reasonable time, while observation suggests that governments do not take much notice of what information scientists write about national information policies, even on those rare occasions when they actually invite their advice on the subject.

    So when I was invited to contribute a paper on information policies to this special issue, my first inclination was to write only on organizational policies. But when I started re-reading the literature and thinking about the article, it became clear that national information policy was the essential context for organizational policies and strategies, which could not be properly understood without it.

    Tackling the subject I had tried to avoid turned out to be worthwhile, because I began to see a coherent story, with some dominant themes that relate these two aspects of information policy.

  • 10 - The evolution of visual information retrieval

  • Edited by Alan Gilchrist
  • Book:
    Information Science in Transition
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    30 April 2009, pp 221-248

  • Summary

    Abstract

    This paper seeks to provide a brief overview of those developments which have taken the theory and practice of image and video retrieval into the digital age. Drawing on a voluminous literature, the context in which visual information retrieval takes place is followed by a consideration of the conceptual and practical challenges posed by the representation and recovery of visual material on the basis of its semantic content. An historical account of research endeavours in content-based retrieval, directed towards the automation of these operations in digital image scenarios, provides the main thrust of the paper. Finally, a look forwards locates visual information retrieval research within the wider context of content-based multimedia retrieval.

    The context of visual information retrieval

    The retrieval of images or image sequences that are relevant to a query is a long-established activity which has evolved quite remarkably during the last 50 years, from the special preserve of a relatively few professional practitioners to the forefront of research in computer vision and a leading edge domestic application of information technology. This extension of traditional information retrieval activity includes both still and moving images, the former usually characterized in the literature as ‘image retrieval’, the latter as ‘video retrieval’, and the two in combination, sometimes, as ‘visual information retrieval’ [1,2].

    The literature of visual information retrieval has grown at a stupendous rate. To quote Jörgensen, in her landmark text within the field:

    Adjectives such as ‘vast’ are often applied to the various literatures … related to image processing, but even this designation is an understatement [3: p. 199].

    More remarkable still is the fact that almost all of that growth has taken place since the early 1990s, and reflects those technological advances which brought the digital image to the attention of the computer scientist. Greatly increased availability of images via the internet, then via mobile platforms, and most recently as an aspect of the social networking phenomenon, has been said to place us

    on the hinge of an important historical swing back towards to what may be called the primacy of the image [3: p. ix].

  • 5 - The information user: past, present and future

  • Edited by Alan Gilchrist
  • Book:
    Information Science in Transition
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    30 April 2009, pp 95-108

  • Summary

    Abstract

    The emergence of research on various aspects of ‘information behaviour’ is explored and its growth as a subject of academic research is documented. The origin of the field as a potential aid to the development of library and information services is noted, as is the transition from this status to that of a subject for research at PhD level and beyond. The development of the field has thus led to a division between the needs of academia for theoretically grounded work, and the needs of the field of practice for guidance for service development. There is, today, a disconnection between research and practice, to a significant extent: early research was undertaken by practitioners but today academic research dominates the scene. Suggestions are made as to how this disconnection can be repaired.

    Introduction

    The ‘user’ has been of interest in librarianship and information science for much longer than either has existed as a focus for research. Virtually every development in the field has been concerned with making it easier for the user to access documents or information. Thus, the first ‘union catalogue’ in England was devised to make it easier for the scholar monks to locate wanted manuscripts in monastery libraries:

    In the late thirteenth century a union catalog was constructed, which included a unified list of holdings of English monastery libraries, ‘Registrum librorum Angliae’… [1: p. 126].

    Charles Ami Cutter's ‘shelf marks’ [2] were designed to make easier the location of a specific book on the shelf, ‘open access’ [see, e.g., 3] was devised to make it easier for the library visitor to get the book he or she wanted without undue delay, Kaiser's ‘systematic indexing’ [4] was devised to enable the rapid location of wanted pieces of information, and so on throughout the history of libraries and information centres.

    It took some time, however, before the ‘user’ as a living, breathing person became the focus of attention in information research. Initially, the focus was on the system used, how it was used and by whom. Thus, the first library surveys were designed to discover what categories of persons used libraries, not what those persons did when they were in a library nor what life or work issues were behind their library use.

  • 3 - The last 50 years of knowledge organization: a journey through my personal archives

  • Edited by Alan Gilchrist
  • Book:
    Information Science in Transition
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    30 April 2009, pp 45-62

  • Summary

    Abstract

    At the time when the Institute of Information Scientists was launched, well established principles of classification, especially faceted classification, provided an excellent springboard for developments in knowledge organization thereafter. The principles of thesaurus construction and use were worked out during the first two decades of the Institute's existence. Up until the end of the 1980s, most practical systems to exploit any of these vocabularies were held on cards, some of them highly ingenious. The subsequent arrival of the desktop computer, soon followed by the growth of networks providing access to an almost unimaginable quantity and variety of resources, has stimulated evolution of the knowledge organization schemes to exploit the technology available. Anecdotes of events and practical applications of controlled vocabularies illustrate this account of developments over the period.

    Introduction

    The last 50 years is just a blip in the history of knowledge organization, if you take the story back to the Library of Alexandria in the third century BC, with its shelf arrangement designed by Callimachus and probably inspired by Aristotle [1]. However, the period from 1958 onwards has seen a major shift in the focus of interest, and more than one transformation in the practicalities of how we apply the principles.

    A systematic review of developments would be too ambitious for this article. Instead it juxtaposes an account of some milestone advances in the period, together with anecdotes illustrating how it felt to work in those times. ‘Principles and practice’, the byline of the Journal of Information Science, seems a fair summary of the approach.

    The run-up to 1958, or, the rise and rise of Classification

    By the time the Institute of Information Scientists was launched, the theory and pioneering development of classification schemes had seen their heyday.

    The problems of an enumerative scheme such as the Dewey Decimal Classification Scheme were well known. (See Berwick Sayers in 1956 [1]: ‘The curious fact remains that more and more libraries throughout the world continue to use it […] somehow it works.

  • 8 - Health informatics: current issues and challenges

  • Edited by Alan Gilchrist
  • Book:
    Information Science in Transition
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    30 April 2009, pp 169-198

  • Summary

    Abstract

    Health informatics concerns the use of information and information and communication technologies within healthcare. Health informatics and information science need to take account of the unique aspects of health and medicine. The development of information systems and electronic records within health needs to consider the information needs and behaviour of all users. The sensitivity of personal health data raises ethical concerns for developing electronic records. E-health initiatives must actively involve users in the design, development, implementation and evaluation, and information science can contribute to understanding the needs and behaviour of user groups. Health informatics could make an important contribution to the ageing society and to reducing the digital divide and health divides within society. There is a need for an appropriate evidence base within health informatics to support future developments, and to ensure health informatics reaches its potential to improve the health and well-being of patients and the public.

    Introduction

    Health care is a complex and information-intensive process in which data concerning the health and medical conditions of individual patients are stored and used for clinical care and management. Additionally, data are aggregated for secondary purposes, such as the management of local health services, the monitoring and surveillance of diseases, and for planning the delivery of health services at regional, national and international levels. Within health care organizations, services and systems, large volumes of data are collected, stored, analysed, transferred, and accessed on a daily basis. In addition to data on individual patients, up-to-date information on how to prevent, diagnose, treat and manage diseases from research is being published and is required by healthcare professionals to provide effective and safe care for patients and the public. Health informatics is a relatively new field that has emerged in the last 20 years and has assumed a growing importance as a discipline. From a Donabedian perspective [1],1 health informatics can be regarded as being concerned with the structures and processes, as well as the outcomes involved in the use of information and information and communications technologies (ICTs) within health. The term ‘e-health’ has been coined to describe the application of these technologies in health and medicine.

  • 7 - From chemical documentation to chemoinformatics: 50 years of chemical information science

  • Edited by Alan Gilchrist
  • Book:
    Information Science in Transition
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    30 April 2009, pp 129-168

  • Summary

    Abstract

    This paper summarizes the historical development of the discipline that is now called ‘chemoinformatics’. It shows how this has evolved, principally as a result of technological developments in chemistry and biology during the past decade, from long-established techniques for the modelling and searching of chemical molecules. A total of 30 papers, the earliest dating back to 1957, are briefly summarized to highlight some of the key publications and to show the development of the discipline.

    Introduction

    Chemistry is, and has been for many years, one of the most information-rich academic disciplines. The very first journal devoted to chemistry was Chemisches Journal, which was published 1778–84 and then, under the name of Chemische Annalen, till 1803 [1]. The growth in the chemical literature during the nineteenth century led to a recognition of the need for comprehensive abstracting and indexing services for the chemical sciences. The principal such service is Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), which was established in 1907 and which acts as the central repository for the world's published chemical (and, increasingly, life-sciences) information. The size of this repository is impressive: at the end of its first year of operations, the CAS database contained ca 12,000 abstracts; by the end of 2006, this had grown to ca 25 million abstracts with ca 1 million being added each year. Most chemical publications will refer to one or more chemical substances. The structures of these substances form a vitally important part of the chemical literature, and one that distinguishes chemistry from many other disciplines. The CAS Registry System was started in 1965 to provide access to substance information, initially registering just small organic and inorganic molecules but now also registering biological sequences [2]. At the end of 1965 there were ca 222,000 substances in the System; by the end of 2006 this had grown to ca 89 million substances, of which ca one-third were small molecules and the remainder biological sequences, with ca 1.5 million being added each year. There are also many additional molecular structures in public databases such as the Beilstein Database [3], and corporate files, in particular those of the major pharmaceutical, agrochemical and biotechnology companies.

  • 16 - How I learned to love the Brits

  • Edited by Alan Gilchrist
  • Book:
    Information Science in Transition
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    30 April 2009, pp 377-383

  • Summary

    As a child I grew up in awe of an English accent. That was not unusual for an American because so many movie stars spoke with an English accent. All during my high school and college days I instinctively believed that anyone who spoke with an Oxford or BBC accent was an authority. And I even held professors and intellectuals who adopted the Harvard version of an English accent in awe. Several of my professors at Columbia University deserved that sort of adulation since they were indeed experts in their respective fields. However, that all changed when I reached Johns Hopkins University in 1951, when I audited a course in statistics with Professor W.G. Cochran. The student who sat next to me was a Brit who spoke with great authority but after a few weeks I began to realize that most of what he said was nonsense.

    For the next few years I had little contact with Englishmen during my stay at Johns Hopkins but my boss at the Welch Medical Library Indexing Project reminded me regularly that he had studied Elizabethan medicine at Oxford.

    My next encounter with the English occurred after leaving the Welch Project. I was impressed by the performance of the editor of the Journal of Documentation, who stood up to the harassment from my then former boss. He was angry at me for submitting a paper to the Journal of Documentation without his permission. So much so that he asked the attorney for the university to write a ‘cease and desist’ letter but the editor did not buckle to his threats. So I can honestly say that my first published paper appeared in an English publication [1]. These stressful events occurred while I was enrolled at Columbia University School of Library Service.

    Of course, even during my two years in Baltimore the British influence on my career was felt strongly. My ‘bible’, so to speak, at that time was the onevolume, 700+page Proceedings of the 1948 Royal Society Scientific Information Conference [2]. I mentioned the key role played by John Desmond Bernal in that meeting when I spoke about his impact on science policy studies and the field of information science at the recent symposium held at University College in Dublin in September 2007 [3].

  • 14 - Social software: fun and games, or business tools?

  • Edited by Alan Gilchrist
  • Book:
    Information Science in Transition
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    30 April 2009, pp 323-346

  • Summary

    Abstract

    This is the era of social networking, collective intelligence, participation, collaborative creation, and borderless distribution. Every day we are bombarded with more publicity about collaborative environments, news feeds, blogs, wikis, podcasting, webcasting, folksonomies, social bookmarking, social citations, collaborative filtering, recommender systems, media sharing, massive multiplayer online games, virtual worlds, and mashups. This sort of anarchic environment appeals to the digital natives, but which of these so-called ‘Web 2.0’ technologies are going to have a real business impact? This paper addresses the impact that issues such as quality control, security, privacy and bandwidth may have on the implementation of social networking in hide-bound, large organizations.

    Introduction

    Fifty years ago information was stored on punch cards. SDI services appeared about 10 years later and databases were available online from about 1978. In 1988 PCs were in common use and by 1998 the web was being used as a business tool. The web of the 1990s might be thought of as ‘Web 1.0’, for now in 2008 there is much hype about Web 2.0, but what does that mean? Web 2.0 is an umbrella term for a number of new internet services that are not necessarily closely related. Indeed, some people feel that Web 2.0 is not a valid overall title for these technologies. A reductionist view is that of a read–write web and lots of people using it. Tim O'Reilly and colleagues [1] introduced the term in 2004 and later produced a report refining the concept [2].

    O'Reilly defines eight core patterns of Web 2.0:

  • Harnessing collective intelligence

  • Data as the next ‘Intel Inside’

  • Innovation in assembly

  • Rich user experiences

  • Software above the level of a single device

  • Perpetual beta

  • Leveraging [sic] the long tail

  • Lightweight software and business models and cost effective scalability.

    • He expands on these patterns as follows. Harnessing collective intelligence is sometimes described as the core pattern of Web 2.0; it describes architectures of participation [3] that embrace the effective use of network effects and feedback loops to create systems that get better the more that people use them. The second core pattern above is jargon for the fact that information has become as important as, or more important than software, since software itself has become a commodity.

  • 15 - Bibliometrics to webometrics

  • Edited by Alan Gilchrist
  • Book:
    Information Science in Transition
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    30 April 2009, pp 347-376

  • Summary

    Abstract

    Bibliometrics has changed out of all recognition since 1958; becoming established as a field, being taught widely in library and information science schools, and being at the core of a number of science evaluation research groups around the world. This was all made possible by the work of Eugene Garfield and his Science Citation Index. This article reviews the distance that bibliometrics has travelled since 1958 by comparing early bibliometrics with current practice, and by giving an overview of a range of recent developments, such as patent analysis, national research evaluation exercises, visualization techniques, new applications, online citation indexes, and the creation of digital libraries. Webometrics, a modern, fast-growing offshoot of bibliometrics, is reviewed in detail. Finally, future prospects are discussed with regard to both bibliometrics and webometrics.

    Introduction

    The last 50 years have seen two major technological changes in scholarly publishing and two major changes in the way research can be quantitatively analysed, alongside numerous less significant developments. The two publishing changes are the computerization of the printing process, reducing costs significantly and allowing more journals and books to appear in print; and the conversion of the entire publishing cycle (submission of articles, refereeing and publication) to the internet, allowing faster and possibly cheaper communication throughout. Historically, the first major change for the development of quantitative analysis of academic publishing (bibliometrics) was the creation of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI, now Thomson Scientific) citation database, which began functioning in 1962 [1, 2] together with associated post-war sociological theory allowing it to be used to assess the impact of scientific work [3]. Since then there has been a continuous increase in the computing power available in universities, which has helped to make increasing numbers of bibliometric analyses possible. The second major development for bibliometrics was the web publishing of an increasingly broad range of research-related documents, from articles to email discussion lists, allowing the creation of a range of new metrics relating to their access and use.

    In this article, the focus is on the measurement of science.

  • 12 - The disparity in professional qualifications and progress in information handling: a European perspective

  • Edited by Alan Gilchrist
  • Book:
    Information Science in Transition
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    30 April 2009, pp 283-298

  • Summary

    Abstract

    This paper is a personal view of the development of the role(s) of information professionals in the 50 years since IIS was founded. One of the justifications for the formation of IIS was that the then current professional bodies were not relevant to the needs of those employed in industrial information services. This paper reviews briefly the situation when IIS was formed, from the viewpoint of professional requirements and the developments since. The conclusion is drawn that today's information world, very different from that of 50 years ago, faces similar problems of a lack of suitable qualifications and a confusion in the roles of different actors in the field.

    Introduction

    The suggested brief I received from the Editor of this compilation marking 50 years since the foundation of the Institute of Information Scientists was to cover the European aspects of the IIS, such as they were. I have added the last phrase because I am not certain that any professional aspect of the role of IIS outside the UK was considered at the foundation. I was, at a time shortly after the foundation, a student at the institution where Jason Farradane, a founding father, taught his brand of information science. One did not discuss the politics of professional bodies within the course, one listened to the opinions on certain aspects of the way information systems and services were created, managed, researched and used and took note of the opinions. The more committed of the students actually joined IIS, although there was no pressure to do so.

    I have drawn upon my experiences as a member of the IIS in ‘Europe’ for a number of years, as a resident consultant to the European Commission and subsequently as the Director of the European Society for Information Dissemination in Chemistry (EUSIDIC) and the International Council for Scientific and Technical Information (ICSTI), in creating this contribution on certain aspects of the way the information sector has developed over the last 50 years, from the almost exclusive domain of librarianship to a regular topic on the front pages of newspapers, TV and radio, driven by a global availability and distribution system.

Page 252 of 302