Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, Volume 35

Citation

Cawkell, T. (2002), "Annual Review of Information Science and Technology, Volume 35", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 58 No. 5, pp. 585-590. https://doi.org/10.1108/jd.2002.58.5.585.2

Vol. 35 has closely followed Vol. 34, recently reviewed in Journal of Documentation, Vol. 58 No. 3. Again I am assuming that every reader of this journal has heard of ARIST so that introductions are unnecessary.

I am also assuming that because the reputation of ARIST has preceded it, and will be known by most readers, it may be taken that this book is well worth having in spite of its rather high price. Accordingly I will use its excellent lists of references as a means of accessing and discussing subjects which I hope will be of interest.

The chapter numbers, titles, and authors in Vol. 35 are as follows:

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   (1) Planning information systems and services:

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  Chapter 1, “The concept of situation in information science”, Colleen Cool.

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  Chapter 2, “Conceptual frameworks in information behaviour”, Karen Pettigrew, Raya Fidel and Harry Bruce.

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  Chapter 3, “Distributed information management”, William Pottenger, Miranda Callahan and Michael Padgett.

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  Chapter 4, “Digital privacy: toward a new politics and discursive practice”, Philip Doty.

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   (2) Basic techniques and technologies:M

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  Chapter 5, “Subject access points in electronic retrieval”, Birger Hjorland and Lykke Nielsen.

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  Chapter 6, “Methods of generating and evaluating hypertext”, James Blustein and Mark Staveley.

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  Chapter 7, “Digital preservation”, Elizabeth Yakel.

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   (3) Applications:

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  Chapter 8, “Knowledge management: an introduction”, Noreen MacMorrow.

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   (4) The profession:

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  Chapter 9, “Library and information science education in the nineties”, Elisabeth Logan and Ingrid Hsieh‐Yee.

Authors, publishers and libraries

In Chapter 3, Pottenger et al. cite Harnad and Odlyzko – notable authors in the “author‐publisher‐library” controversy. They are also cited by Oppenheim et al. in their review of the topic (Oppenheim et al., 2000). The papers by Odlyzko (1999) and Harnad (1999) are major articles in which relationships between the protagonists listed at the beginning of this section are discussed.

As Oppenheim et al. (2000) say:

The nature of a market driven by authors has led to major problems. While authors are desperate to publish and not perish, libraries are unable to purchase the amount being published. This has created a situation where the forces that publish research material are out step with those who buy it.

A proposed solution which is gaining ground is the “open archives initiative” (OAI) whereby authors, acting as their own publishers and, without having to surrender the ownership of their articles in copyright agreements with a publisher, will publish their papers and offer them free on the Internet.

A paper will need to conform to a certain a standard, probably XML, and will need to have metadata added to it. The idea has been much debated. A good discussion is provided in Nature (nature.com, 2002).

A local organiser will need to act as editor and publisher and the inertia in the present system will cause changes to be slow. However the incentive is considerable and there is much activity. In the UK, the joint information services committee (JISC) is sending out requests for proposals in its Focus on Access to Institutional Resources programme (FAIR).

According to Horvath (2002), authors realised that they could publish and retrieve directly on the Internet following the introduction of a free online library called PubMedCentral, started by Nobelist Harold Varmus under the auspices of the National Institute of Health. They became frustrated with the publisher’s “tight lucrative control over their work”. A group of biomedical scientists in the USA invited opinions from biochemists to a demand that publishers should publish their research results on line quickly and without charge. Scientists responded with 26,000 signatures from over 150 countries. The Public Library of Science (2002) has been formed as a:

… non‐profit organisation of Scientists committed to making the world’s scientific and medical literature freely accessible to scientists and to the public around the world.

Tenopir and King (2002) bring a different viewpoint to the discussion:

Experience shows that it is much more difficult to adopt new technologies throughout a complex system than one might think. The quality filters of peer‐reviewing, editing, indexing, abstracting and bundling articles together in categories all add to the system’s overall value. If we discard the functions performed by librarians and publishers, we will surely need to reinvent them. There is a tendency to promote an innovation as the only solution to a problem when, in fact, it would merely provide a niche satisfying certain information needs.

Digital privacy

In Chapter 4, Doty cites Warren and Brandeis:

… who have several major themes that have had enormous influence on the development of privacy as a social concept. These themes continue to characterise many elements of privacy discourse.

The endurance of this paper (Warren and Brandeis, 1890), although published so long ago, continues. The Web of Science lists over 400 references to it up to February 2002.

The paper still makes very interesting reading. Warren and Brandeis say:

Gradually the scope of legal right broadened and now the right to life has come to mean the right to enjoy life – the right to be left alone, the right to liberty secures the exercise of extensive civil privileges and the term “property” has grown to comprise every form of possession – intangible as well as tangible.

The authors do not hold in high regard the daily papers of the day:

To occupy the indolent, column upon column is filled with idle gossip, which can only be procured by intrusion upon the domestic circle … but each crop of unseemly gossip becomes the seed of more, and, in proportion to its circulation, result in a lowering of social standards and of morality.

Warren and Brandeis quote the case of Prince Albert v. Strange where the court held that the common‐law rule prohibited not merely that reproduction of the etchings which the plaintiff and Queen Victoria had made for their own pleasure, but also “the publishing (at least by printing all writing though not by copy or resemblance) a description of them whether in the form of a catalogue or otherwise”.

Images and digitization

On page 360 of Chapter 7, Yakel cites a report by Gonzalez (1998) about this subject. IBM have been publishing information about their imaging work for many years. I am familiar with several of their projects including the high quality reproduction of pictures by the American painter Andrew Wyeth, the Archivo General de Indias (AGI) project, and the development of software (QBIC) for retrieving pictures containing specified objects.

Of these, the AGI project is the largest. Repeated handling of the unique documents covering Spanish activities in the New World was causing them to deteriorate. To begin with it was decided to digitize about nine million pages, including maps, plans and pictures relating to the discoveries of Columbus. The intention in the 1980s was to digitize eventually the whole collection of 90 million pages. The project was launched in 1986 by the Spanish Ministry of Culture, the Ramon Areces Foundation, and IBM Spain[1]. Access is via workstations at the Archivo de Indias in Seville. Completed some years ago, the material is stored on optical discs. Image processing methods were used to make legible some of the badly stained original documents.

The British Library has already digitized the Lindisfarne Gospels and Leonardo da Vinci’s notebooks. It is starting on a ten‐year digitization project jointly with IBM (Rogers, 2002).

Knowledge management

In Chapter 8, MacMorrow cites Nonaka and Takeuchi’s (1995) book and declares it to be “a seminal work in the field”. The book deserves this title – it was cited nearly 600 times up to February 2002. The Web of Science (WoS) does not provide details of citations from books – all the citations appear to be from books so we cannot use this data to obtain information about the current citing works. Nonaka is the first Xerox distinguished professor of knowledge at the University of California at Berkeley and publishes in the California Management Review. He expands his ideas about knowledge in this publication with “The concept of ‘ba’ – ‘ba’ being a shared space for emerging relationships” (Nonaka and Konno, 1998). Since the California Management Review is covered as a source item in the The Web of Science, we may be brought forward to many current citing items, only some of which are books. Up until March 2002 there were 43 citations to this article.

Nonaka’s work is recognised in a short summary of knowledge management by Malhotra (1998). The effective utilisation of information remains an elusive issue says the author. It is believed that investments of over one trillion dollars in information technology have produced little improvement in the effectiveness of knowledge workers. Strassman (1997) is one of the most outspoken critics of this field. A reviewer of his book says:

When he scrapes away the muck from the accepted methodology and trims some of the statistical assumptions he finds that executives’ faith in information technology has cost US business tens of billions of wasted US dollars.

Strassman was at one time chief information officer at Xerox and the Pentagon.

McMorrow also cites several papers by T.H. Davenport, in particular Davenport (1999) where 31 knowledge management projects in 24 different companies were studied.

Library and information science education

A number of references are made to the Kaliper report (Kaliper Advisory Comittee, 2000) in Chapter 9. The report, entitled Educating Library and Information Science Professionals for a New Century, produced by a committee of scholars, is stated to be “the most extensive examination on the Library and Information Science Curriculum since the 1923 Williamson report”. While the Williamson report reached some negative conclusions, the Kaliper report finds a “vibrant, dynamic, changing field that is undertaking an array of initiatives”. All but one of the scholars, Professor Tom Williams from Sheffield University, were American.

A feeling of optimism about the future of library schools comes across in this chapter as opposed to the gloom which accompanied the closure of schools in the 1980s:

As a whole the field is much stronger now than it was at the end of the 80s. Schools have incorporated technology into their curriculum to different extents but all have recognised that a knowledge of information technology is essential to information professionals.

Note

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   A beautifully illustrated booklet in colour is still published by the Ministry of Culture Madrid, IBM and the Areces Foundation. It may be available from IBM Spain at Santa Hortensia 26‐28, 28002, Madrid.