Christina's LIS Rant

One of the great things about my interests overlapping computer science is that computer scientists believe in self archiving and making their work freely available on the web. The scientometric parts of IS are that way, too, but the L of the LIS... well, that's just sad (except for Dorothea, her stuff is available). I still hope to write a review of one of these books because I'm really enjoying it. Here are a few:

• Hearst, Marti (2009). Search User Interfaces. Cambridge University Press. Available from: http://searchuserinterfaces.com/book/.
  Sure there are lots of books on information retrieval, search engines, interface design, and information architecture. This book is about designing the interaction required for good searching. There is more to it. I'm about a third the way through reading this book and it's excellent so far. She cites references for each point she makes and that makes me happy. I actually plan to buy a print copy at some point although it's really cool how you can mouseover the citations in the online version and it shows you the whole citation - you don't have to click to the bottom of the page or click through.
• Easley, David and Kleinberg, Jon (in press)  Networks, Crowds, and Markets: Reasoning About a Highly Connected World. Cambridge University Press. Available from: http://www.cs.cornell.edu/home/kleinber/networks-book/ (in pdf per chapter or entire book).
  You might say, oh another book on networks, sigh, but Kleinberg is a leader in that area and this book grew out of a course he's taught up there. I'm not as familiar with the markets part so I plan to browse those sections.
• Manning,Christopher D., Raghavan, Prabhakar, and Schütze,Hinrich(2008)  Introduction to Information Retrieval. Cambridge University Press. Available from: http://nlp.stanford.edu/IR-book/information-retrieval-book.html 
  One kind of cool thing about this site is that the authors have continued to update the book as they go. In that way, it might even be better than the print book.This is sort of a standard book on information retrieval. I've read maybe 6 chapters from it. Some are easier to understand than others.
• Allen, Robert B. (in press) Information: A Fundamental Construct. Available from http://www.cis.drexel.edu/faculty/ballen/ISS/index.html
  This book is new to me, but I enjoyed my class with Dr. Allen and I think there's a need for a general intro to LIS book.

Note: I had this post 90% done a few weeks ago - but my computer died.