How To Find Out How Much Pearls Are Worth

Webology

Review by Mary Joan Crowley (Sapienza University of Rome)

" Webology " ISSN 1735-188X, is an international journal, open access and peer-reviewed , dedicated to World Wide Web. Special attention is given to the dissemination of information and communication processes as well as the social and cultural implications of the web. The magazine was founded in 2004 and is published quarterly. The publisher of the journal the Department of Computer Science and the University of Tehran (Iran), the editors and are associated, respectively, Alireza Noruz and Hamid R. Jamali . Both editors, as can be seen by their personal profiles, have extensive international experience and the other members of the editorial staff come from different countries such as Australia, Canada, South Africa, USA, China, France, and so on.

The international flavor of the magazine is also evident in its very nature, a magazine or online oriented Web (as medium), but also to its contents. The contents of the journal which are widely indexed (there's abstracts) are published under the terms of the Creative Commons license , ie that the legal system that offers six different sections of the copyright in the form "some rights reserved "in order to ensure circulation and reuse the work.

Since its foundation, " Webology " has ranged over a wide variety of topics and interests. There is a strong emphasis on new methods and technologies, primarily oriented towards experimental work, but there are theoretical and historical works. In today's topics are many: the digital library, libraries and the Web, information transfer, human behavior in search of information, the social impact of information, marketing in information, the management systems' information system (MIS), infometrica, scientometric, bibliometric, citation analysis, user studies and usability, intellectual freedom, the filtering of sites, the 'open access , knowledge organization, and always with the term Web in the name : semantics, ontology, thesaurus , "metric" ( Webometrics ) intelligence (WI), mining, and much more.

There are special numbers. The latest issue of the Journal has as its guest editor Louise Spiteri's School of Information Management Dalhousie University (Canada). The entire issue is devoted to folksonomy. The number
editorial reads as follows:

"The papers in this special issue Reflect the Diversity of Approaches taken to create better Web Resources That Reflect the needs of end users. Particular emphasis is Placed on the need to manage the tags and Increasing volumes of information available on the Web, Particularly as more people are Becoming Engaged with Numerous social applications. As is discussed in Some of the papers in this special edition, there is scope Certainly in Which to Consider ways to combine the more traditional controlled vocabularies with the free-flowing nature of tagging. "

Weller and Peters suggest in their paper to introduce a garden tag that allows a match between synonymous terms, thus providing an additional structure other than tags or tag clouds -user-document co-occurences in order to improve accessibility.
Some interesting articles published in previous issues:

• Application of Web 2.0 tools in medical librarianship to support medicine 2.0 of Vahideh Zare Gavgani e V. Vishwa Mohan, Osmania University, India;
• Deterring digital plagiarism, how effective is the digital detection process? di Jayati Chaudhuri, University of Northern Colorado Libraries, USA;
• Cybercrime and the law: an islamic view di Mansoor Al-A’li, University of Bahrain;
• Library 2.0 theory: web 2.0 and its implications for libraries di Jack M. Maness, University of Colorado at Boulder Libraries, USA;
• Search engines and power: a politics of online (mis-)information di Elad Segev, Keele University, UK;
• A personalized word of mouth recommender model di Chihli Hung, Chung Yuan Christian University, Taiwan.

As can be seen, the field is really wide, since it dealt with themes of topical interest for authors from all over the globe. A demonstration of this fact, we observe that the statistics of the site's readers' Webology "from all over the world, mainly from Singapore, USA, Russia and Germany, followed by Benin, United Arab Emirates, UK, Saudi Arabia and Australia.

Another service of the magazine are reviews of books that not only are a good source of information on the latest publications, but also a way for librarians to be today's date in their particular areas of specialization, as well as going into unfamiliar areas. " Webology " lends a voice to different points of view and gives coverage to topics that would be difficult if not impossible to find elsewhere. No doubt it is a welcome contribution to the world of libraries and information science, the more welcome because the contribution comes from an "emerging" countries.

You can subscribe to receive email alerts for of news, but given the large amount of mail we receive today, perhaps it would be preferable to an RSS service.

[post-print from "The Librarian", III series, ISSN 11250992, 1 / 2009, p. 125-127]