The Internet: Its Impact and Evaluation

The Proceedings of an international forum held at Cumberland Lodge, Windsor Park, 16-18th July 1999, organised by City University, and sponsored by Aslib, The Association for Information Management, The British Library and News International. The purpose of the conference was to: explore methods for evaluating the Internet's many features and functions; assess the impact of the Internet in strategic areas of human endeavour, so providing us with an understanding of the way that the Internet is fashioning the world we live in; identify the key information and communication principles, ideas and concepts that are emerging as a result of the spread and development of the Internet; and put down an agenda for future Internet research and collaboration.
Contents: The challenge: unstable knowledge, unstable times; Three-dimensional impact: a case study of electronic government; Joining up information and learning; Newspapers and the net: peaceful coexistence or fight to the death? The impact of the Internet on the ownership of information; Impact of the Internet: some conceptual and methodological issues; Studying the impacts of the Internet without assuming technological determinism; The relevance of information retrieval research for the evaluation of the WWW; From bibliometrics to cybermetrics; Web metrics: too much data, too little analysis; Surveying the global diffusion of the Internet; Tracking and evaluating the global information consumer; Evaluating the net as a 'local' information resource.