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The purpose of this paper was to check the validity of Bradford’s Law in the contemporary world of academic electronic mailing lists.

The present research study applied Bradford’s Law to academic electronic mailing lists to determine: whether, on the Internet, mailing lists and the posts sent to them follow the same distribution as scientific journals and the articles published in them with respect to the original form of Bradford’s Law; and whether the behaviour of the Bradford distributions differs depending on the type of academic discipline (social studies or sciences) and subject category (documentation and education, medicine and life sciences) to which the list belongs. As a prior step, the utility of mailing lists was analysed during the 10-year period of 2002-2011, together with their expected future in terms of ratifying the applicability of the Law.

The results showed that, in general, electronic mailing lists are continuing to be used, and that Bradford’s Law is indeed satisfied, especially in the science subject categories, coherent with the fact that Bradford’s Law in cybermetrics holds only for fairly narrow (closed) and well-defined (homogeneous) environments.

The originality of the present research study was to check the validity of the historic Bradford’s Law in the contemporary world of Internet.

Takes a broad look at Computer‐Mediated Communication (CMC) norms. Examines some of the simpler procedural norms as well as broader norms for social behaviour in particular types of networked communities.

Electronic mail (e‐mail) has become one of the most indispensable means of communication of our times. One of its applications is discussion lists. The paper looks at discussion lists in general and academic discussion lists in particular. It further highlights some very important directories of discussion lists, including both electronic and print versions, pertaining, but not limited, to academic and scholarly discussion lists.

Online forums help in stimulating debates and reflection on a wide range of cultural topics, as well as providing answers for museum professionals working in specialised areas. The main objective of this paper is to concentrate on the relevance of individuals interacting virtually within an informal knowledge setting, from which to judge the value of Web‐based discussion groups. However, little is known about how museum‐related forums target their audience and which subjects are of real interest to them. Arising from the statistical results of an international survey of users of online museum forums, the authors have investigated the users’ socio‐demographic profile, their content preference, and favourite Web‐based discussions (e.g. e‐mail lists, newsgroups, forums). The outcome of the collected data should be useful in further binding together the worldwide museum community, as there is great scope for enlivening interactions and empowering individual knowledge in various fields of expertise.

The KIDSPHERE mailing list is an online service which was created to further the development of school networking. The growth of this service has paralleled the rapid rise in the use of the Internet by students and teachers in schools around the world. Describes the history of KIDSPHERE, how the service is used, and what value it provides to its subscribers. Services of this type play an important role in building a community of educators on the Internet and in furthering the goals of educational reform.

This paper aims to report a QA system that can answer how‐type questions based on confirmed knowledge acquired from mails, posted to a mailing list. It aims to propose a method of detecting incorrect information in mails posted to a mailing list (ML) by using mails that ML participants submitted for correcting incorrect information in previous mails.

The paper discusses a problem of acquiring knowledge from natural language documents, then proposes a method to give these mails three kinds of confirmation labels, positive, negative, and other, depending on their credibility.

The paper shows a QA system based on the confirmed knowledge. It finds mail questions that are similar to the user's question and gives answers and their confirmation labels to the user. By using the confirmation labels, the user can easily choose the information that can solve his or her problem.

The study describes a method of detecting incorrect information in mails posted to a mailing list and acquiring confirmed knowledge from them.

The purpose of this paper is to investigate how women working in science, engineering and technology use online networking, for career and professional development purposes.

A combined qualitative and quantitative approach is taken, using interviews for the first phase of the research and online surveys for the second. The findings are discussed and presented with reference to theories on career development and in the context of recent work on women's networks and online social networking.

The paper defines a typology of online networks and identifies the motives women have for engaging with the different types. The data imply that women are successfully using online networks to find support, advice and collaboration from women working in similar environments. However, the data only identify a few examples where the use of online networks has led to a specific new job opportunity.

The findings are limited by the samples used, as they were self‐selected. In the first phase of the research, the sample was biased in favour of those using information and communication technologies. In the second phase, women using some form of online network were purposefully targeted in order to understand the motives and benefits associated with these activities.

The paper provides new insights into how professional women are networking online. It extends recent work into women's networks and networking strategies and presents a timely exploration into how these are being affected by the growth of online social networking.

The paper aims to present a wide range of useful freely available internet resources (e.g. directories, e‐journals, FAQs, mailing lists, and weblogs) that allow the reader to investigate the major aspects of the important open access (OA) movement.

The internet resources included in this webliography were identified during the course of one of the authors writing the Open Access Bibliography: Liberating Scholarly Literature with E‐prints and Open Access Journals. The authors evaluated, selected, categorized, and annotated these resources to construct this webliography, which complements the bibliography.

The most useful resources have been annotated and organized into webliography sections. For example, the “Starting Points”, “Debates”, and “General Information” sections list resources that orient the reader to OA and the issues involved. The different “Directories (and Guides)” sections alert the reader to useful finding aids on relevant subjects.

This webliography provides easy access to the most relevant internet resources for understanding and practicing OA. It affirms the significance of OA in scholarly communication, and it identifies the key parties involved in and/or contributing to the OA movement.

The director of marketing and operations for a financial newsletter must deal with a host of issues that surround the practice of renting mailing lists and soliciting new subscribers by direct mail. The case can be used to introduce the concept and calculation of customer lifetime value.

Small voluntary sector organisations with limited budgets often cannot afford expensive commercial software and may not need all the facilities such software provides. A large quantity of cheap software is distributed in the form of shareware but, for a number of reasons, is not widely used in the UK. This article describes the findings of a postgraduate project which aimed to assess the usefulness of shareware to information officers in small, voluntary sector organisations. A specific objective was to identify reliable shareware packages that could be used to manage reading lists, mailing lists, and other inhouse databases. The packages evaluated were 3by5, Business Librarian, File Express, Freefile, Instant Recall and PC‐File 5. The use of four of the packages was tested in two voluntary organisations (the National Self‐Help Support Centre and the Women's Nutritional Advisory Service) and is described.