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Many of today’s information and technology systems and environments facilitate inquiry, learning, consciousness-raising and knowledge-building. Such platforms include e-learning systems which have learning, education and/or training as explicit goals or objectives. They also include search engines, social media platforms, video-sharing platforms, and knowledge sharing environments deployed for work, leisure, inquiry, and personal and professional productivity. The new journal, Information and Learning Sciences, aims to advance our understanding of human inquiry, learning and knowledge-building across such information, e-learning, and socio-technical system contexts.

This article introduces the journal at its launch under new editorship in January, 2019. The article, authored by the journal co-editors and all associate editors, explores the lineage of scholarly undertakings that have contributed to the journal's new scope and mission, which includes past and ongoing scholarship in the following arenas: Digital Youth, Constructionism, Mutually Constitutive Ties in Information and Learning Sciences, and Searching-as-Learning.

The article offers examples of ways in which the two fields stand to enrich each other towards a greater holistic advancement of scholarship. The article also summarizes the inaugural special issue contents from the following contributors: Caroline Haythornthwaite; Krista Glazewski and Cindy Hmelo-Silver; Stephanie Teasley; Gary Marchionini; Caroline R. Pitt; Adam Bell, Rose Strickman and Katie Davis; Denise Agosto; Nicole Cooke; and Victor Lee.

The article, this special issue, and the journal in full, are among the first formal and ongoing publication outlets to deliberately draw together and facilitate cross-disciplinary scholarship at this integral nexus. We enthusiastically and warmly invite continued engagement along these lines in the journal’s pages, and also welcome related, and wholly contrary points of view, and points of departure that may build upon or debate some of the themes we raise in the introduction and special issue contents.

The purpose of this paper is to examine the nature of students' library‐research difficulties, especially difficulties rooted in technology, to describe how the BiblioBouts information literacy game helps students overcome these difficulties, and to discuss how BiblioBouts has evolved in order to reduce students' difficulties with the technology of the library‐research process.

Data collection was multi‐modal involving quantitative instruments such as questionnaires and logs of students' game‐play activity and qualitative involving game diaries that students voluntarily completed after time they played the game, focus group interviews with students who played and did not play the game, and personal interviews with instructors before and after their students played the game.

The technology underlying the library research process is difficult to use. BiblioBouts helps students overcome their difficulties. BiblioBouts continues to evolve to enable students to reduce their difficulties with this technology.

Playing BiblioBouts gives students exposure to searching library databases but game play per se does not focus on searching.

Students benefit from playing BiblioBouts. They gain first‐hand experience and practice with library‐research technologies such as the library portal for database selection, library databases for quality information, and Zotero for citation management. They are exposed to more sources than they would have found on their own and a logical, methodical process for evaluating the sources they find.

Online social gaming has been enlisted to transform library research from a solitary activity into a collaborative activity where students document their research activities and share in the research trail that individual game players leave behind.

The research underlines gaming's effectiveness for teaching incoming undergraduate students information literacy skills and concepts.

This paper aims to provide a bibliometric study of journal articles related to institutional repositories in the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI) between January 1993 and August 2017. This study will provide researchers with a foundation for further research.

In this study, articles published were analyzed; titles were searched using the term “institutional repositories.” The data were evaluated in response to four research questions on the following topics: publication trends, prolific authors, core journals and times cited.

The results indicate that 124 articles on institutional repositories were authored by 223 individuals. These articles were cited 722 times in 37 journals, and the h-index provided by the Web of Science was 14.

This study only investigated articles titled with institutional repositories in the SSCI. Other items were not included.

This study shows that the implementation of institutional repositories has been limited to library and information science. If they can be used broadly in different disciplines, a better outcome can be expected.

Based on the findings, the growth of institutional repositories as an academic subject is likely to continue. If such discussions can be conducted in other disciplines, institutional repositories may be able to provide a more promising outcome to academia.

This paper is valuable for researchers who wish to examine the trends of institutional repositories in the SSCI and seek possible areas for further research.