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Bulletin, October/November 2008


Bulletin Editor, Irene TravisEditor's Desktop

Irene L. Travis, Editor

Bulletin of the American Society for Information Science and Technology

Bulletin@asis.org

Information standards are the focus of this issue of the Bulletin. ASIS&T has a standing Standards Committee that tracks standards, formulates the Society’s positions with regard to those of interest and promotes the development of new standards that seem desirable. In addition the committee has a duty to keep the membership informed about developments in this arena. While standards sessions are a regular feature of the ASIS&T Annual Meetings, the Bulletin also carries standards-related articles with some regularity. Occasionally special sections focus in some depth on particular developments, for example, the Dublin Core or those standards developments related to the Functional Requirements for Bibliographic Records (FRBR). 

This section, put together for the Standards Committee by Mark Needleman, who chaired the committee for a number of years, didn’t start with a specific focus, but drew on the interests of the authors. The result is two articles on metadata registries and related topics; one on the revisions currently underway to the ISO standard for thesauri; one on the state of standards broadly related to the difficult area of electronic resource management (ERM); and a paper presenting a perspective of how standards relate to integrating and implementing highly complex systems. The papers are very informative, and I thank Mark, the authors and the current chair of the Standards Committee, Marcia Zeng, for their efforts.

Our other feature article concerns search engine technology. Search engine technology is rapidly evolving and is of critical importance to information architecture (IA), among other fields. Many of our recent IA columns under the editorship of Stacy Surla have focused on its critical role. Here Paul Thompson reports for us on the 2008 Infonortics Search Engine Meeting, which provides a comprehensive view of the latest developments.

In our IA Column in this issue, Michael Magoolaghan discusses not his work for Vanguard, but his volunteer efforts to help his local library integrate their virtual and physical environments. It is an unusual topic and one that will be of broad interest.

Finally, on the ASIS&T side, we have the third installment of Margeaux Johnson’s and Nancy Roderer’s analysis of the data collected by a recent survey carried out by ASIS&T and Wiley-Blackwell to establish a bench line for the behavior and attitudes of readers and authors of JASIST (the ASIS&T journal) with respect to scholarly publishing prior to implementing the Society’s new “Romeo green” access policy. This final piece covers the responses of respondents who said that they had published in open access journals. The problems of scholarly publication are also the subject of Nancy Roderer’s President’s Page, along with reflections on the future of the Society.