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The purpose of this book is to open a conversation on the idea of information experience, which we understand to be a complex, multidimensional engagement with information. In developing the book we invited colleagues to propose a chapter on any aspect of information experience, for example conceptual, methodological or empirical. We invited them to express their interpretation of information experience, to contribute to the development of this concept. The book has thus become a vehicle for interested researchers and practitioners to explore their thinking around information experience, including relationships between information experience, learning experience, user experience and similar constructs. It represents a collective awareness of information experience in contemporary research and practice. Through this sharing of multiple perspectives, our insights into possible ways of interpreting information experience, and its relationship to other concepts in information research and practice, is enhanced. In this chapter, we introduce the idea of information experience. We also outline the book and its chapters, and bring together some emerging alternative views and approaches to this important idea.

This essay comments on what three eminent UW-Madison economists taught during the first half of the 20th century: John R. Commons (1862–1945), Selig Perlman (1886–1959), and Martin Bronfenbrenner (1914–1997). What we know about what and how they taught varies. Interestingly, little or no effort has been made to preserve records that might inform us about what college and university economists taught their students and when and how new ideas and issues found their way into the teaching of economics. This thought first came to me in the years immediately following my joining the UW-Madison faculty in January 1965. I realized that many of us who gained experience in the policy arena while on leave in Washington DC during the 1960s incorporated that experience into our teaching at all course levels. This meant our students benefited from being on the cutting edge of emerging policy issues, such as poverty, negative income tax, human capital, military draft, and the all-volunteer army, the Kennedy round trade negotiations, tax policy, and cost–benefit analysis. We regularly incorporated these issues into our teaching, usually a half-dozen years before they made their way into the next edition of the textbooks and thus reached a wider student audience. Once incorporated into textbooks, these issues became much less interesting to teach because they had been boiled down to pedestrian textbook-style prose.

Purpose — The purpose of this chapter is to give an overview of the context of Web search and search engine related research, as well as to introduce the reader to the sections and chapters of the book.

Methodology/approach — We review literature dealing with various aspects of search engines, with special emphasis on emerging areas of Web searching, search engine evaluation going beyond traditional methods and new perspectives on Web searching.

Findings — The approaches to studying Web search engines are manifold. Given the importance of Web search engines for knowledge acquisition, research from different perspectives needs to be integrated into a more cohesive perspective.

Research limitations/implications — The chapter suggests a basis for research in the field and also introduces further research directions.

Originality/value of paper — The chapter gives a concise overview of the topics dealt within the book and also shows directions for researchers interested in Web search engines.

Library and information science (LIS) is a global academic, intellectual and industrial field with a large international reach. From a human perspective, LIS includes library and information professionals, the information industry people, students, academics and researchers. The field has a strong history of teaching, education and research development, standards, networks and distribution worldwide. Growth and development in the field have taken in all parts of the world. In this monograph we focus on the current trends in teaching, education and research in the Asia-Oceania region. This vast region of the world covers Asia, which is from Korea and Japan in the north to India in the west and Indonesia in the south, and Oceania (Australia New Zealand and neighbouring islands such as Fiji, Papua New Guinea, etc). In this book we have tried to cover as much of the Asia-Oceania region as we could within the chapters presented, but not every country or aspect of LIS in the region has been represented.