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To highlight content of interest to this journal’s readership that promotes current thinking and activities in information technology.

A selective conference report of the annual meeting of the American Library Association and a pre‐conference.

The largest conference of librarians, the variety of programs, activities, exhibit halls, creates one of the best professional development opportunities for librarians. Attracting librarians from all sectors and work environments from around the globe, this conference is hard to describe in a brief way except to say it is an experience. Documenting relevant programs about information technology was the goal of this contribution.

An alternative to not being present while gaining some information and coverage.

Contains information of particular interest to readers who did not attend these sessions. Introduces them to presenters and important hot topics.

The Web has been a growing topic of interest since its introduction into the popular culture. This study examines the use of the Web by the Fortune Global 100 firms relative to the Fortune 100. It examines the firms’ desire and ability to communicate to and with individuals and organizations interested in the firm. Each firm’s site was reviewed for accessibility, content, and inquiry potential. The Fortune 100 seems to be slightly ahead of the Fortune Global 100 in terms of information content and interactivity but trail in the area of multiple language availability. All of the other criteria that were examined did not clearly favor either group.

The purpose of this paper is to provide a comprehensive background on the recent legislative, regulatory, and prosecutorial scrutiny of mutual funds and underlying issues such as the level and transparency of fees and costs, distribution and sales practices, and fund governance.

Provides a detailed chronology of events since January 2003 concerning mutual fund scandals such as trading abuses and questionable sales practices and related issues such as revenue sharing, directed brokerage, soft dollars, market timing, late trading, and selective disclosure. The chronology in this issue of JOIC will be followed an article in the next issue that describes reform initiatives that have taken place in response to the scandals.

Despite criticism and scrutiny of equity mutual funds following poor performance in 2001 and 2002, meaningful efforts to achieve reform began to lose momentum in mid‐2003. Then concern with mutual fund abuses was reignited in September 2003 when New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer announced a settlement with Canary Capital that involved market timing, late trading, and selective disclosure. Since then there have been numerous disclosures of fund trading abuses and questionable trading practices, and the resulting uproar has triggered significant efforts to reform the manner in which funds and their service providers conduct business.

This comprehensive chronology provides an essential reference by bringing together all the events and underlying issues related to mutual fund scandals, abuses, regulation, compliance, and reform efforts since January 1, 2003.

This paper aims to investigate whether audit fees and financial report readability are bi-directionally related.

The authors test their hypotheses with empirical data. Specifically, they adopt a two-stage simultaneous equation regression model to assess the bi-directional relationship between audit fees and financial report readability.

While poor readability increases the fees charged by the auditor, higher audit fees improve the readability of the financial reports.

This study is based on US data. Future research may extend this study to other countries.

Poor financial report readability encumbers stakeholders of the firms. Understanding the interaction between financial report readability and audit fees will help both auditors and firm managers.

Audit committees aggressively negotiating for lower audit fees should be aware of the link of low audit fees, potentially indicative of poor quality, to less readable reports. Investors and regulators too should be concerned about this relationship, especially in instances when auditors low-ball audit fees or when firms aggressively negotiate for lower audit fees.

To the best of authors’ knowledge, this study is the first to document the bi-directional relationship between financial report readability and audit fees and assess the positive impact of audit fees on financial report readability.

To share information and insights from the American Library Association (ALA) Midwinter Meeting. Several contributors reported on different aspects of this meeting. Design methodology/approach –A report of the conference.

Summary of discussion forums, work of ALA's Divisions, and conference lore.

A working meeting to plan for the annual conference in June 2007. This meeting attracts the current leadership of the different divisions in ALA who are holding discussion groups and committee meetings as there are no official programs at Midwinter.

Conference reports on many current trends in scholarly communication issues to information professionals in academia, access, and intellectual property issues related to a range of library environments and the state of the art in technology.

To highlight content of interest to this journal’s readership that promotes current thinking and activities in information technology.

A selective conference report of the annual meeting of the American Library Association and a pre‐conference.

The largest conference of librarians, the variety of programs, activities, exhibit halls, creates one of the best professional development opportunities for librarians. Attracting librarians from all sectors and work environments from around the globe, this conference is hard to describe in a brief way except to say it is an experience. Documenting relevant programs about information technology was the goal of this contribution.

An alternative to not being present while gaining some information and coverage.

Contains information of particular interest to readers who did not attend these sessions. Introducers them to presenters and important hot topics.

This paper aims to discuss the viewpoint that Big Data’s major impacts on the accounting community will be changes in consumers’ demand of accounting data and its impact on decision-making. Big Data is leading consumers to prefer more atomized (not summarized but rather reduced to discrete units), reconfigurable and transparent accounting data that they can combine into their own structures to meet their own decision-making needs. Consequently, consumers will demand digital goods that are less static, and summarized.

This paper discusses the strategic shift to what is referred to as “indirect data,” and develops a model that helps explain “how” and “why” Big Data may impact this change in consumer digital demand.

There are many evolving Big Data opportunities associated with the shift in consumer demand for more atomized, reconfigurable and transparent accounting data that are discussed in this paper, including strategic capability, auditing, performance measurement and reporting, standardization and education.

This paper provides a discussion of the evolving opportunities of the relationship that is created by a strategic shift in the type of digital goods consumers of information, specifically decision-makers, will demand, as well as the potential impacts on the accounting community.

The purpose of this postmortem is to assess whether the design, implementation, and maintenance of financial policies during the period from 1996 through 2006 were primary causes of the financial system's demise.

To draw conclusions about the policy determinants of the crisis, the paper studies five important policies: Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC) policies toward credit rating agencies, Federal Reserve policies concerning bank capital and credit default swaps, SEC and Federal Reserve policies about over‐the‐counter derivatives, SEC policies toward the consolidated supervision of major investment banks, and government policies toward two housing‐finance entities, Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac.

The evidence is inconsistent with the view that the collapse of the financial system was caused only by the popping of the housing bubble (“accident”) and the herding behavior of financiers rushing to create and market increasingly complex and questionable financial products (“suicide”). Rather, the evidence indicates that senior policymakers repeatedly designed, implemented, and maintained policies that destabilized the global financial system in the decade before the crisis. Moreover, although the major regulatory agencies were aware of the growing fragility of the financial system due to their policies, they chose not to modify those policies, suggesting that “negligent homicide” contributed to the financial system's collapse.

Although influential policymakers presume that international capital flows, euphoric traders, and insufficient regulatory power caused the crisis, this paper shows that these factors played only a partial role. Thus, current reforms represent only a partial and thus incomplete step in establishing a stable and well‐functioning financial system. Since systemic institutional failures helped cause the crisis, systemic institutional reforms must be a part of a comprehensively effective response.