A number of new books and reports have arrived on my desk over the last couple of months. I hope to get around to reviewing them shortly, but in the meantime here are some brief details.
- Innovations in Information Retrieval. Allen Foster and Pauline Rafferty (Editors). Facet Publishing. This is a set of seven essays on a range of information retreival topics, including the role of browsing in information retrieval, the importance of classification and the assessment of web search engines.
- Interactive Information Seeking, Behaviour and Retrieval. Ian Ruthven and Diane Kelly (Editors). Facet Publishing. Another excellent collection of thirteen essays from Facet Publishing. The range is so broad it is almost a textbook on information retrieval. The authors are all respected authorities, such as Kalervo Jarvelin writing on evaluation, Ryen White on interactive techniques and Elaine Toms on task-based information searching and retrieval.
- Usability of Mobile Websites and Applications. Raluca Budiu and Jakob Nielsen, Nielsen Norman Group. This report runs to nearly 300 pages and has around 500 screen shots. As always with NNGroup reports the level of insight is very high. An invaluable report and if you have any interests in mobile websites and apps then this is essential reading.
- Transforming Collaboration with Social Tools. PWC Technology Forecast. 2011 No. 3. A ready readable introduction to social media with a strong focus on collaboration. There is a good comparative table of the main collaboration tools and some excellent case studies.
- The Impact of Internet Technologies: Search. McKinsey. This 56pp report looks at the $780 billion of value created by the 1.6 trillion searches conducted across the web each year, and assess who benefits and why. A very interesting read with some fascinating statistics.
Martin White