Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, Vol. 39

Philip Calvert (Victoria University of Wellington, Wellington, New Zealand)

Online Information Review

ISSN: 1468-4527

Article publication date: 1 June 2005

103

Keywords

Citation

Calvert, P. (2005), "Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, Vol. 39", Online Information Review, Vol. 29 No. 3, pp. 321-323. https://doi.org/10.1108/14684520510607632

Publisher

:

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2005, Emerald Group Publishing Limited


This is the fourth ARIST volume under the editorship of Blaise Cronin, and this one illustrates the steady evolution of the product under his care. The range of topics is, once again, extremely diverse, and there must be at least one chapter of interest to any information manager willing to look beyond the obvious. Personally I find the arrival of each new ARIST volume to be one of the treats of the year, and any library with an LIS collection ought to subscribe to this title.

This year there are 14 chapters divided into five sections. Cronin states in his Introduction that it is unlikely any reader will read the volume from cover to cover. Accordingly, I have read the first chapter of each section for this review and fully intend to read the others as and when the need or desire arises.

The first section is broadly titled “Information retrieval”. Two of the chapters are on new approaches: statistical language modelling, and fusion techniques in IR, plus a chapter on the relatively new phenomenon of “webometrics”, currently attracting a great deal of attention. It is the latter chapter that is most likely to catch the eye of the general reader, and Thelwall and his co‐writers have done a good job with a huge subject, and they have not tried to avoid identifying the problems that remain. Xiaoyong Liu and Bruce Croft deal with a topic more familiar to computer scientists than to most information managers – the application of statistical language modelling to information retrieval, which involves estimating a probability distribution that captures statistical regularities in natural language use. This helps retrieve a document when it can be established that the language model of a query is probably using the same language model found in the document. It is worth noting that this method has produced better results than the “Okapi” formula now quite common in LIS systems. This sort of retrieval method is inevitably obscure to most practitioners, but theoretical improvements in IR eventually work through to retrieval systems in common use, so awareness of developments is a requirement of those with a long‐term view.

The second section, with another broad title in “Technology and systems”, includes three chapters. The first is on “Information visualization”, by Bin Zhu and Hsinchun Chen. Using patterns or visual clues is as old as any form of information retrieval, but here the authors focus on the visualisation of unstructured textual documents. They begin with a review of visualisation techniques, starting with maps, to make things clear to the uninitiated. They then present an overview of scientific, software, and information visualisation. In their framework for information visualisation techniques they discuss information representation, including Sneiderman's seven types of representation models. The purpose of most visualisation systems is to convert abstract information into visual objects that can be analysed by the human eye more rapidly than, for example, thousands of separate items of data. The case of digital library visualisation is an example that many readers will appreciate. Of the other chapters in the section, I found Benoit's chapter on Bioinformatics easy to read.

Even if they do not work directly in an international environment, many information managers are curious about interface design and the impact of culture, which means that Ewa Callahan's chapter at the start of Section III: Social informatics, will be a popular read. The literature she reviews deals with many elements of an interface that can hinder use or understanding by people of a different culture or language group. Language is an obvious barrier, and one that English language designers will have to accept as the numbers of non‐English speaking web users increases. There are different written language formats (character sets, for example, even though Unicode is becoming more common), vocabulary, and systems for keeping times and dates that involve coding and translation, to name a few. Differences in graphic design include different cultural responses to colour, layout, and icons. Beyond singular variations, there are conceptual problems such as the understanding of metaphors, and this poses a significant problem for designers of digital libraries, a concept easily misunderstood by those not fortunate enough to use traditional libraries on a regular basis. Other element of cultural variation can be assessed with the use of Hofstede's familiar dimensions of culture. Callahan concludes her tour of the issues by making the sensible, but easily overlooked point, that usability studies may have to be carried out for each culture that uses the site, and that methods for such studies are themselves subject to cultural variations, as anyone will attest who has tried to conduct a satisfaction survey with Asian respondents unwilling to criticise anybody! The importance of culturally variable interface elements to user interaction is made easier to comprehend in a simple table. Callahan does not present many solutions – perhaps there are no simple “solutions” to be found to such massive cultural variation, and indeed, wouldn't the world be poorer if a single interface style dominated the web?

Perhaps not surprisingly, Cronin decided to tackle a difficult subject himself in the first chapter of Section IV: National Intelligence. The threat of extreme terrorism to national security, and the role of intelligence in countering that threat may not seem, to the traditional librarian or information manager, to be a topic for this volume, yet “intelligence” in a general form is now just as much part of the LIS lexicon as information or knowledge, and there can scarcely be more crucial uses of intelligence gathering than preserving national security. Keegan, the doyen of military historians, said that intelligence during the Cold War did not have the objective of winning, just of staying in the game (Keegan, 2003). It is much the same now, as security forces know they have little chance of beating an enemy that does not fight pitched battles but attacks weak points through suicide bombers and other “non‐synchronous” warfare tactics, yet they must try to uncover each and every terrorist plot and arrest the culprits before they can do their worst. It is an enormous challenge. Cronin says little of actual intelligence gathering techniques in the new warfare, for they seem to be largely unchanged from previous wars – largely signal and communications intelligence, fleshed out by what little human intelligence can be gathered against an enemy that does not seem to be influenced by financial inducements or intellectual persuasion. The key, as he sees it, is to restructure the intelligence agencies so they are better matched to the new enemy. If Al‐Qaeda is largely a network organisation (as Castells would describe it) then a massive bureaucracy is not a suitable structure to use against it. Government agencies need to be smaller and more flexible, he argues, so that they are responsive to each new development of the enemy. As they morph, so would the intelligence agencies. This chapter may not be what you expect in the ASIST annual, but it is compelling reading.

Finally, Section V: Theory, includes three chapters. The first of them is on a popular topic, “Managing social capital”, by Elisabeth Davenport and Herbert Snyder. Social capital is broadly defined as the benefits that accrue from an individual's social relationships, and within this the authors focus on the narrow question of whether social capital can be managed by ICTs. They stick to two themes. The first is an analysis of the “objects” and the “rules” that allow social capital to be configured, and then analysed, in a management support system. Clearly not every aspect of a social relationship can or should be analysed, so the first step is to know what can be. Secondly, they examine the contexts in which such objects are embedded. This is the sociotechnical dimension sometimes referred to in the knowledge management literature. Many information managers will already be familiar with social network analysis (SNA), at least in general terms, and the authors have sensibly decided to assume a basic knowledge in the reading audience, so much of the discussion here is on the application of SNA in information environments, which is far more useful to the intended audience. Other issues discussed include the matter of trust (the “glue” that holds together an organisation), managing relationship capital in online teams (and what can create a suitable working relationship), measuring social capital (with indexes, grids, typologies, and ranking mechanisms), and the difference between intellectual capital and social capital. The authors readily admit that they have not proposed a grand theory or model for the simple reason that the subject is still emerging and needs time to mature. Nevertheless, this is a fascinating read.

Each chapter includes a long bibliography that acts as guides to further reading for the intellectually curious. I wish the general index were a bit more detailed, but that is picking fault with an otherwise excellent volume which is highly recommended.

References

Keegan, J. (2003), Intelligence in War: Knowledge of the Enemy from Napoleon to Al‐Qaeda, Hutchinson, London.

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