The World Wide Web is growing quickly and being applied to many new types of communications. As a basis for studying organizational communications, Yates and Orlikowski (1992; Orlikowski & Yates, 1994) proposed using genres. They de � ned genres as “typi� ed communicative actions characterized by similar substance and form and taken in response to recurrent situations ” (Yates & Orlikowski, 1992, p. 299). They further suggested that communications in a new media would show both reproduction and adaptation of existing communicative genres as well as the emergence of new genres. We studied these phenomena on the World Wide Web by examining 1000 randomly selected Web pages and categorizing the type of genre represented. Although many pages recreated genres familiar from traditional media, we also saw examples of genres being adapted to take advantage of the linking and interactivity of the new medium and novel genres emerging to � t the unique communicative needs of the audience. We suggest that Web-site designers consider the genres that are appropriate for their situation and attempt to reproduce or adapt familiar genres.

Abstract not found

Electronic publishing opportunities, manifested today in a variety of electronic journals and Webbased compendia, have captured the imagination of many scholars. These opportunities have also destabilized norms about the character of legitimate scholarly publishing in some fields. Unfortunately, much of the literature about scholarly e-publishing homogenizes the character of publishing. This article provides an analytical approach for evaluating disciplinary conventions and for proposing policies about scholarly e-publishing. We characterize three dimensions of scholarly publishing as a communicative practice-- publicity, access, and trustworthiness, and examine several forms of paper and electronic publications in this framework. This analysis shows how the common claim that e-publishing "substantially expands access" is oversimplified. It also indicates how peer-reviewing (whether in paper or electronically) provides valuable functions for scholarly communication that are not effectively replaced by self-posting articles in electronic media.

In the past several years, researchers in library and information science, computer science and management information systems have claimed that knowledge workers will transform important characteristics of work due to increased access to digital libraries over the Internet. To explore the in¯uence of digital libraries on knowledge work, this study investigated the use of paper and electronic materials by academic researchers in four disciplines at eight US research universities. This study found that at a given point in time, the match between `material mastery ' and features of using a particular digital library could explain its use. This paper discusses ®ndings about digital library use, work characteristics and how material mastery explains patterns of digital library use. # 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.

The Internet has fostered a faster, more interactive and e#ective model of scholarly publishing. However, as the quantity of information available is constantly increasing, its quality is threatened, since the traditional quality control mechanism of peer review is often not used (e.g., in online repositories of preprints, and by people publishing on their Web pages whatever they want). This paper

We show how personalization techniques can be exploited to implement more adaptive and effective information access systems in electronic publishing. We distinguish persistent (or long term) and ephemeral (or short term) personalization, and we describe how both of them can be profitably applied in information filtering and retrieval systems used, via a specialized Web portal, by physicists in their daily job. By means of several experimental results, we demonstrate that persistent personalization is needed and useful for information filtering systems, and ephemeral personalization leads to more effective and usable information retrieval systems.

electronic journal

Internet growth seems to amplify the critiques to peer review mechanism: many researchers maintain that Internet would allow a more fast, elastic, interactive, and effective model of publishing. I propose a new kind of electronic scholarly journal, with the aim of changing the submission-review-publication process. The new electronic scholarly journal is described in both intuitive and formal ways. 1

This thesis looks at the impact of the technologies of networking and hypermedia on the scholarly journal. It does so in five main sections. The first section, Overview and Theory, begins by outlining the aims of the study and examining prior related work. Next it defines the three main theoretical perspectives that inform the research (a constructuralist ecology of communication, punctuated equilibrium, and a genre-based framework for new media) as well as considering and rejecting a number of alternatives. The second section, Publishing and Technology, first places the scholarly journal in its historical context and then identifies the stakeholders in the scholarly journal ecology. It then looks at the range of technology developments over the last twenty years that have the potential to be applied to scholarly communication. The third section, Potentials and Responses, looks at the ways in which both publishing functions and stakeholder roles could be transformed and at some of...

In 1971 UNISIST proposed a model for scientific and technical communication. This model has been widely cited and additional models have been added to the literature. There is a need to bring this model to the focus of information science (IS) research as well as to update and revise it. There are both empirical and theoretical reasons for this need. On the empirical side much has happened in the developments of electronic communication that needs to be considered. From a theoretical point of view the domain-analytic view has proposed that differences between different disciplines and domains should be emphasised. The original model only considered scientific and technical communication as a whole. There is a need both to compare with the humanities and social sciences and to regard internal differences in the sciences. There are also other reasons to reconsider and modify this model today. Offers not only a descriptive model, but also a theoretical perspective from which information systems may be understood and evaluated. In addition to this provides empirical exemplification and proposals for research initiatives.