Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST), Volume 43

Citation

Burke, M.A. (2010), "Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST), Volume 43", Program: electronic library and information systems, Vol. 44 No. 2, pp. 166-170. https://doi.org/10.1108/00330331011039526

Every volume of the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST) revitalises my enthusiasm for the discipline of information science (IS), causes me to think about potential applications, and identifies exciting research topics. It makes me proud to be an “Information scientist” or indeed a member of any information profession. This volume is no exception, with a mix of core topics, e.g. information architecture and human information behaviour, and some newer ones, e.g. collaborative tagging, literature related discovery, and author name disambiguation. The Introduction, which is accessible online, provides an accurate overview of the contents and the backgrounds of the authors (Cronin, 2009).

Volume 43 of ARIST is divided into the following four sections:

1. 1.

   Speciality growth.

2. 2.

   Information organisation and discovery.

3. 3.

   Information use.

4. 4.

   Theory building.

Section I contains two of the longest chapters in the volume, which deal with specialised fields within information science, namely: “Similarity methods in chemoinformatics” by Peter Willett and “Geographic information science” by Jonathan Raper. Each author has an academic background in the subject area to which information systems are being applied and this knowledge is necessary to appreciate this section fully.

Peter Willett recognises the wide scope of chemoinformatics and chooses to focus on aspects that relate to information retrieval, drawing an analogy between the similarity property principle for molecules and cluster hypothesis for documents.

Jonathan Raper also presents a selective but deep review of the theory, data and software of geographic information science (GISc). He includes an excellent critique of GISc from the standpoints of philosophy, social theory, productivity, information science, and the internet, thereby demonstrating a strong multi‐dimensional ethos.

These two chapters combined account for almost one‐quarter of the text and make a significant contribution to theory and interdisciplinarity.

Section II consists of four Chapters: “Information architecture” by Elin K. Jacob and Aaron Loehrlein; “Collaborative semantic tagging and annotation systems” by Jane Hunter; “Literature‐related discovery” by Ronald N. Kostoff et al.; and “Author name disambiguation” by Neil R. Smalheiser and Vetle I. Torvik.

Jacob and Loehrlien begin with a detailed discussion of the definition of “information architecture”, deciding that it is the provision of effective and multiple means of access to relevant information resources on a website. They make an analogy with architecture because of the predominance of hierarchical structures. They quote the term “information scent” as a measure of the extent to which the label on a web link reflects the information content of the information resource to which the link points. As an amateur website designer, this reviewer hoped to obtain some tips from this chapter. While there is some coverage of evaluating structures in library websites, unfortunately the authors conclude that research needs to progress from evaluation of individual websites to generalised methods that could be applied to updating or revising a site's architecture.

Jane Hunter introduces a new ARIST topic of “semantic tagging and annotation systems” in Chapter 4. She focuses on systems that are web‐based, collaborative and descriptive, with Web 2.0 social tagging as a sub‐category. She reviews current research into the benefits and limitations of community generated annotations for information retrieval. The chapter is enriched by the inclusion of diagrams of conceptual models for the architecture of annotation systems. These figures and one table really help in categorising current systems. The author presents a three‐layer architectural model for annotation systems: user interface layer, application layer, and data storage layer. She discusses the ambitious TagCommons initiative that aims to develop mechanisms for semantic interoperability and mapping among disparate tagging systems. She uses diagrams effectively to show how the RDF node‐arc structure can model web‐based annotations. Some of these diagrams are the author's own, others are from identified sources. Her categorisation of annotation methods is useful for practitioners and researchers alike, especially as she relates it to existing systems. The author bemoans the lack of scholarly research on social tagging systems and recognises that there is a lot of descriptive material available. She identifies and lists some manual annotation tools for html and text documents, e.g. Ontamat; desktop tools, e.g. NEPOMUK; and multimedia documents, e.g. Flickr for photos, FOAFing the Music, YouTube, etc.

For this reviewer some of the shorter sections dealing with social, ethical, visual and user aspects were most interesting, e.g. the section on motivating people to tag. The author also considers emerging and future technologies, including microformats, RDFa, GRDDL and tagging associations or relationships and identifies research that aims to overcome the problems of social tagging in the conclusion of the article. Overall this chapter is a very accessible starting point for a researcher or practitioner who needs a foundation in collaborative social annotation and it does an excellent job of integrating theoretical models with practical examples.

Chapter 5 on “Literature‐related discovery” by Ronald N. Kostoff is unique for ARIST in that there are nine co‐authors, two of whom are medical doctors. The chapter reviews open discovery systems for literature based discovery. The early part of the chapter depends heavily on papers by Swanson, it also draws strongly on medical literature and bioinformatics. For this reviewer, the chapter reads as a medical paper rather than an IS one and is inappropriate for the general IS reader, as it contains long lists of medical terms and many acronyms. For example, in the Section on Parkinson's Disease (PD) there is one long paragraph which is just a list of medical terms, which I assume are potential treatments for PD, this style is repeated in sections for other medical conditions. The second half of the chapter is more relevant as it focuses on semi‐automated software approaches for predicting potential discovery. Once again the authors get rather bogged down in describing individual experiments. Having ploughed through the medical content, it is disappointing to find in the discussion that the authors consider the experiments to have failed. There are some interesting conclusions on comparison of MeSH with free‐text vocabulary. While this reviewer is strongly in favour of interdisciplinary collaboration, this chapter needs tighter editing to focus on IS content.

Chapter 6 on “Author name disambiguation” by Neil R. Smalheiser and Vetle I. Torvik takes the reader back to a perennial challenge in cataloguing: identification of the author/creator and description of his/her name unambiguously. The authors commence the chapter by reviewing current approaches to disambiguation. In this reviewer's opinion they dismiss a registry of unique author identifiers too easily. The authors progress to describing their own approach to author name disambiguation in Medline, using the Author‐ity tool. There is an interesting link between Chapters 5 and 6, as Smalheiser and Torvik refer to literature‐based discovery without naming it:

A common scenario involving implicit information arises when an investigator finds experimentally that two phenomena, previously thought to be unrelated, are unexpectedly related in some way, and would like to find existing knowledge that might shed light on potential mechanisms that may link them (pp. 299‐300).

While the Author‐ity project is very successful the authors conclude that a unique set of problems and issues arise for author disambiguation for each collection of information resources. This is a valuable chapter that bridges traditional catalogue and metadata creation, the topic is also important for accurately measuring the publication output of the individual researcher and for the social web.

Section III “Information use” consists of two chapters: “Information behavior” by Karen E. Fisher and Heidi Julien, and “The layperson and open access” by Alesia Zuccala.

Fisher and Julien provide a comprehensive review of developments in this broad sub‐field. Even with a clear limit on the scope of information behaviour (IB) and a baseline of the recent ARIST 2006 chapter, there is a lot of literature to cover. The authors use three approaches to structure the material: initially discussing method and context, followed by specific populations (academics, workers, ordinary people), and finally theoretical frameworks. The section on specific user groups and information sources is the largest and at times it becomes a list of papers with a brief summary of the findings of each one. The lack of conclusions from this section reflects the dependence of IB research on isolated studies, with theory tacked on rather than underpinning the research. The section on “Concepts in Information Behavior Research” attempts to overcome this deficiency by identifying some of the relevant concepts and analytical perspectives. These include: discourse analysis, user focus, affect and emotional states, and conceptual frameworks. The latter identifies the key monographs and journal articles that have reviewed theories of IB. Again the problem seems to be so many small theories from within IS that fail to recognise the potential of cognate disciplines to contribute to the field, e.g. psychology (especially cognitive and dynamic psychology), organisational behaviour and sociology of communication. This reviewer strongly endorses one of the statements in the conclusions:

To our minds, however, the field's biggest challenge lies in making itself known and relevant to society. How ironic that information behaviour can be viewed as encompassing nearly all information‐related phenomena and yet hardly anyone outside its narrow membership actually refers to it or seems aware of its existence (p. 342).

The authors highlight research that shows that only researchers (Brenda Dervin and Gerard Salton) who span more than one discipline were cited significantly outside IS. Dervin makes a case for active dialogue between among LIS researchers, communications and human‐computer interaction. This reviewer would extend this collaboration to cognate researchers in other social science disciplines, drawing on their methods and literature. It is also worth noting that the references in this chapter are almost exclusively to IS journals, only a handful from 16 pages of references are from non IS sources and three of these have Karen Fisher as joint author.

The authors conclude:

We expect that the next ARIST review of the information behaviour field will contain many more examples of how researchers are engaging with system designers, information professionals, information architects, policy makers, and others in the academic, corporate and government worlds to mediate the role of information in people's everyday and professional lives (pp. 342‐3).

This reviewer's opinion is that a deeper change of approach is needed, which couches IB research as a part of a broader study of human behaviour in various settings, e.g. how poverty affects every‐day activity, with IB as part of this activity. Information behaviour is not an isolated activity – it is part of each individual's and organisation's cognitive, social, and physical processes and it is driven by the context in which people live and work.

There is some duplication between Chapters 7 and 8, as Alesia Zuccala has a significant section on information‐seeking behaviour in her chapter on “The Lay Person and Open Access”. She also discusses public understanding of science, and science communication. She generates a useful model of the relationship between the scientific research system and the public understanding of science. This chapter is a valuable extension to the review by Drott in ARIST in 2006.

Section 4 “Theory building” consists of two chapters: “Document theory” by Neils Windfield Lund and “Gatekeeping: a critical review” by Karine Barzilai‐Nahon. Neils Lund presents more than a review – he extends the historical theory of documents to the digital age. This is an interdisciplinary and international paper that draws on philosophy, bibliography and information science and identifies the difference in attitudes to “Documentation” in Latin/Francophone and Anglophone/Scandinavian IS worlds. The author describes a modern interdisciplinary initiative on document theory known as RTP‐DOC. This collaborative project involves writing a collective text on digital document theory. On a more practical level, he describes the establishment of a programme in “Documentation studies” in Norway to meet the needs of broad legal deposit legislation for documents of all kinds: printed matter, broadcast TV, radio, movies and digital documents. The author concludes that two trends are evident through the evolution of document theory: first, the question of how broadly or narrowly a document should be defined and second, deciding on the component parts of a document.

In this reviewer's opinion this is a key chapter for establishing the foundation of IS historically and in the future. It develops theory and enhances the relationship between IS and other disciplines. The literature review provides evidence for the use of other disciplines and will influence them in turn.

Karine Barzilai‐Nahon presents considerable original research data and analysis in the final chapter: “Gatekeeping: a critical review”. She begins by identifying the past theories of gatekeeping, drawing on mass communications, management, organisational, sociological, and political science literature in addition to information science theories. The author then progresses to present an in‐depth analysis of current gatekeeping literature (1995‐2007) with considerable statistical data on these studies, e.g. rationale for gatekeeping by field of study, and an overview categorised by author and date, category, definition of gatekeeping and key questions. This quantitative approach to data collection for a review is laudable. There is such broad and deep content here that it is difficult to do justice to the chapter in this review, for example the author presents the results of a cross field analysis, where she looks at themes that emerge across fields. She identifies Network Gatekeeping Theory as an approach to facilitate transfer of concepts between fields, incorporating multi‐field approaches and vocabulary. This chapter plays a significant role in promoting LIS expertise on gatekeeping to an interdisciplinary committee.

I strongly recommend volume 43 of ARIST to a variety of readers: as a starting point for a researcher embarking on a new research topic or an academic module, as a reference tool for practitioners, and as a PR tool for promoting awareness of the IS discipline. It is unlikely that many readers will read the full volume from cover‐to‐cover as the chapters are too diverse.

Overall the key theme that strikes this reviewer is the increasing interdisciplinarity of IS as represented by many chapters in this review. One negative aspect is the lack of any clear linking of individual chapters, other than through the index, resulting in some overlap in content especially in the Information Use section. The obvious way to facilitate these links would be by producing an electronic version of the publication.