Editorial
Introduction
One of the things we spend a good deal of time on in readying the papers for publication is copy-editing. We have a strong team of volunteer copy-editors who work with authors to improve the style of their papers and then I do a final copy-edit before uploading them to the site. This level of attention is particularly necessary when an author's native language is not English. In this, we seem to differ from a number of journals in the field: some publishers appear to have given up copy-editing completely, simply accepting the camera-ready copy for publication. Even the title of a paper may be difficult to understand.
Such an approach does the reputation of a journal no good at all, and perhaps more significantly, harms the reputation of the Editor, and raises the question of why Editorial Boards are not doing more to ensure quality - or is quality nowadays simply the Impact Factor? Perhaps one needs to be cautious in accepting the position of Editor: before doing so, it would be useful to discover what the copy-editing policy of the journal is and how much effort is put into making papers readable. Given the number of so-called 'open access' journals now looking for Editors and Editorial Board Members, one needs to be even more alert.
In this issue
We have eight papers in this issue, representing a diverse range of approaches to information-related research. Two deal with what we might call the interaction between person and machine: one by Salehi and colleagues explores the use of personalisation in information searching, the other explores eye movement patterns as users interact with the interface elements of an informaiton system.
Three papers deal with aspects of social media: Tali Gazit and colleagues explore the roles of active participants and lurkers in online discussion groups in Israel; Lee and Kang discuss collaborative information behaviour in an online community devoted to obtaining justice for the victims of a ferry accident in South Korea; and Chen and Liu look at the effect of reward mechanisms in social question and answer Websites.
Finally, three papers deal with diverse topics: the acceptance and use of video digital libaries (Ju and Albertson); the selection of e-books for children by parents (Schlebbe); and the reading behaviour of researchers in state research institutes of Finland (Late).
It will be noted that the authors of these papers come from a wide range of countries: Australia, China, Finland, Germany, Israel, South Korea, and the USA, and that some of the papers are the result of international collaboration.
Book reviews
We have reviewed some interesting books for this issue: for me, the highlight was Meredith Broussard's, Artificial unintelligence: how computers misunderstand the world, which is a timely corrective to the notion that artificial intelligence is about to take over the world of work. I was particularly amused by her case study on the self-drive car: if these things ever get into general use I shall be a) very surprised and b) avoid them like the plague.
Although I didn't review it, Vincent Mosco's, Becoming digital: toward a post-internet society, is another warning volume about information technology and the problems associated with 'becoming digital': these warning shots are coming at the right time to be used by citizens to lobby governments to ensure their security and safety in the digital world. Politicians rarely, it seems, have very much understanding of the digital world and are all too ready to accept the word of big business: they should read both of these books.
Lastly
At the time of preparing the previous issue I had 'flu; this time I'm struggling with a time-table that included a conference in Crete, followed not too long after, by a holiday. However, we seem to have made it. My thanks to Albin Olsson in Borås for his help in the process.
Professor Tom Wilson
Editor in Chief
June, 2018