Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST) Volume 39

Citation

Burke, M.A. (2005), "Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST) Volume 39", Program: electronic library and information systems, Vol. 39 No. 4, pp. 397-399. https://doi.org/10.1108/00330330510628079

The Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST) is a unique publication, an essential reference work for students and researchers in information science and cognate domains. Each volume, including the 2005 one under review here, consists of individual review articles dealing with key themes for the year in question. The current editor, Blaise Cronin, accurately reflects the scope of the field with a range of topics in 14 individual chapters that range from “Statistical Language Modeling in Information Retrieval” to “Poststructuralism and Information Studies”.

The contributors span various levels of seniority from doctoral student to distinguished professor. All have significant reputations within their area of expertise and many have relevant professional experience. Not surprisingly the majority of contributors are based in North America but there are some Europeans.

There are five main sections: Information retrieval; Technology and Systems; Social Informatics; National Intelligence; Theory; most of which have three chapters.

The nature of the publication means that each chapter contains a synthesis of the topic with a very high frequency of references to primary sources and an extensive bibliography. The chapters are essential starting points for a literature review on a topic. Each chapter will now be described in turn to give a sense of the content.

Chapter 1 is a review of “Statistical Language Modeling for Information Retrieval” by Xiayong Liu and Bruce Croft. While this may be a difficult topic for readers without a mathematical background, the writing style is very clear and the basics of statistical language modelling for information retrieval are presented clearly and simply. Yet the fuller discussion and the references encourage the reader into a deeper exploration of the topic.

Chapter 2, “Information Retrieval on the Web” by Kiduk Yang, and Chapter 3 on “Webometrics” by Mike Thelwall, Liwen Vaughan and Lennart Björneborn, are both very topical. Their content is relevant to web users and designers as well as researchers, although the former may have difficulty coping with the statistical parts.

Chapter 4, “Information Visualisation” by Bin Zhu and Hsinchun Chen, makes good use of screen dumps in discussing digital library visualisation, web visualisation and virtual community visualisation.

Chapter 5, “Bioinformatics” by Gerald Benoît, deals with a new topic – this is the first time it has appeared in ARIST. The author states that it is written primarily for computer and information scientists interested in applications in biology, and secondarily for biologists curious about the computer technology that supports their research. This chapter is a real eye opener for the scope of bioinformatics given the importance of biomolecular research internationally.

Chapter 6, “Electronic Records Management” by Anne Gilliland‐Swetland, treats a central information science and technology (IST) theme. The chapter contains a good mix of theory and practice. It clarifies the changing definition of archives and investigates the transition from information to evidence. It considers crucial issues such as authenticity and metadata.

Chapter 7, “Interface Design and Culture” by Ewa Callahan, discusses how culture affects information design. It brings together approaches to interface design, cultural differences and empirical research.

Chapter 8, “The Social Worlds of the Web” by Caroline Haythornthwaite and Christine Hagar, is very topical and relevant. It brings together useful statistics on web usage from a number of sources, and also explores cases of web use that show the complexity of online and offline threads.

Chapter 9, “Children, Teenagers, and the Web” by Andrew Large, is very broad in scope and has many potential readers both within and outside the IST community. It integrates many aspects, including information seeking behaviour, web site design, education and personal safety issues.

Editorship gives the editor the scope to define, and in this case extend, the boundaries of the discipline. This is very evident in the two chapters in Section 10, “National Intelligence”.

Chapter 10, “Intelligence, Terrorism, and National Security” by Blaise Cronin, has a very different style – it reads more as an essay and less as a review. The focus is on the USA but there are references to revolutionary struggles in other countries. He questions whether developments in IST have reinforced unhelpful bureaucratic processes, and suggests that social informatics and cultural anthropology may provide a better platform for intelligence gathering relating to global terrorism.

Chapter 11, “Domestic Security Surveillance and Civil Liberties” by Lee Strickland, David Baldwin and Marlene Justsen, reviews the evolution of government surveillance in the USA. Although the focus is on the US, e.g. the USA Patriot Act, some aspects apply to other jurisdictions. The discussion of a proposed scheme for the management of surveillance in a representative democracy still has a strong US bias, although the British model of oversight is covered in a brief paragraph. The authors conclude that secrecy poses a real risk of abuse and must be constrained through effective checks and balances. They make the balanced argument that “Simply stated, information awareness can be equally critical for national security and dangerous to individual liberty”. This is the longest chapter in the volume.

Chapter 12, “Managing Social Capital” by Elisabeth Davenport and Herbert Snyder, explores ways in which social capital may be managed with information and communication technologies (ICTs). It begins by presenting various definitions of social capital and then considers each of the elements of social capital in sequence, including structural, cognitive and relational dimensions. They examine a number of relevant case studies and raise some implications for managers. They state correctly that “we have not synthesized all of these [models, examples, ways of measuring social capital] into a grand narrative or model  … ”.They do dispel some management myths about social capital and ICTs.

Chapter 13, “Labor in Information Systems” by Julian Warner, begins by considering the concepts of labour from Genesis to Marx, economics and information science. It develops an analytical framework for labour in information systems. The section entitled “Information Retrieval Systems” relates the distinctions between semantic and syntactic and communal and universal labour to information retrieval systems, construction and searching in a very useful diagram.

Chapter 14, “Poststructuralism and Information Studies” by Ronald Day, makes a significant contribution to the theoretical content of the volume. He reviews and extends previous research on meaning, historicity, discourse analysis, hermeneutics and events.

Overall, this issue of ARIST maintains the authoritative level of previous volumes. While its style and structure may be more attractive to academic researchers and teachers, there is much to interest practitioners, e.g. the “Web” theme which pervades many chapters provides direct practical application of theory to practice. Most readers are likely to dip into certain sections and chapters rather than read the volume from cover‐to‐cover. This volume of ARIST fulfils an excellent promotional role in extending the scope of IST into areas such as biological research, national intelligence and social informatics.

There is an understandable time lag in publishing a printed publication of this nature, but this has been minimised here, with many chapters containing 2003 references.

My only criticism is of the index, which is very pre‐coordinate – a mix of author and topic. It appears to be very dependent on the words or phrases used by the author, e.g. “authenticity of electronic records”. There is a lack of consistency in the use of direct and indirect entry. However the accurate and meaningful chapter titles will provide the main access route to the content.