Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, Volume 40

Citation

Burrows, T. (2007), "Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, Volume 40", Library Hi Tech, Vol. 25 No. 3, pp. 436-437. https://doi.org/10.1108/07378830710821014

For 40 years the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST) has been providing an authoritative survey of developments and trends in this field. The themes and topics covered in each annual issue vary considerably, reflecting the broad scope and changing nature of information science and its relationships with a range of cognate disciplines.

The 40th volume includes a stimulating mixture of old and new subjects among its 13 chapters, as well as an interesting contrast between the specific and the more general and conceptual. Among the chapters which expand the boundaries of what might be considered “information science” is the analysis by Angela Cora Garcia and five co‐authors of the relatively new field of workplace studies, defined as research into the social organization of work. Crucial to this is the study of human interaction with technologies in the workplace. “Information history” is another new field, which Alistair Black reviews and for which he sets out a tentative research agenda.

Several specific and practical areas of applied information science are covered. Donna Harman and Ellen Voorhees review the work of the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) since 1992, and Hsinchun Chen and Jennifer Xu look at intelligence and security informatics. Particularly interesting and revealing is the chapter devoted to “information failures in health care” by Anu MacIntosh‐Murray and Chun Wei Choo, which summarizes research into the role of information culture and information flow as factors underlying health care mistakes and failures.

Three very timely chapters address topics of particular relevance to the academic world. Matthew Zook provides a thoughtful look at the different geographies of the Internet: technical, human, political and cultural and economic. Carl Drott surveys the state of play with Open Access and offers a judicious open finding on its future. Jonathan Foster reviews recent work in collaborative information seeking and retrieval, including social navigation, filtering and recommending.

Taken as a whole, this volume demonstrates just how wide‐ranging and diffuse the broad field of “information science” really is. The perspectives vary so much between the different chapters – practical, theoretical, conceptual, policy‐oriented – that each is likely to appeal to a rather different audience. As a general rule, however, the different surveys are thorough and well written and certainly continue ARIST's tradition of providing a reliable guide to recent research trends.