Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services

I've always thought that Morgan & Claypool's Synthesis product is one of the best, most forward-looking products out there. They give quality, targeted, born-digital content of the kind that I can push out to faculty & grad students. And most of all, content that's worth paying for. They're also very receptive to the library community, welcoming input and feedback. And supporting our activities at conferences, etc.

Now they've even given back by starting a series of basically Information Science lectures on Synthesis!

Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services is edited by Gary Marchionini of the University of North Carolina. The series will publish 50- to 100-page publications on topics pertaining to information science and applications of technology to information discovery, production, distribution, and management. The scope will largely follow the purview of premier information and computer science conferences, such as ASIST, ACM SIGIR, ACM/IEEE JCDL, and ACM CIKM. Potential topics include, but not are limited to: data models, indexing theory and algorithms, classification, information architecture, information economics, privacy and identity, scholarly communication, bibliometrics and webometrics, personal information management , human information behavior, digital libraries, archives and preservation, cultural informatics, information retrieval evaluation, data fusion, relevance feedback, recommendation systems, question answering, natural language processing for retrieval, text summarization, multimedia retrieval, multilingual retrieval, and exploratory search.

Take a look at the first four:

• Introduction to Webometrics: Quantitative Web Research for the Social Sciences by Michael Thelwall
  
  
• Exploratory Search: Beyond the Query-Response Paradigm by Ryen W. White, Resa A. Roth
  
  
• New Concepts in Digital Reference by R. David Lankes
  
  
• Automated Metadata in Multimedia Information Systems: Creation, Refinement, Use in Surrogates, and Evaluation by Michael G. Christel

Great stuff -- I think this is going to end up being a terrific resource. You can see some of the lectures they have under development here:

• Digital Libraries by Ed Fox
  
  
• Faceted Search by Daniel Tunkelang, Endeca
  
  
• Grid-Based Repositories by Reagan Moore, Renaissance Computing Institute (RENCI)
  
  
• Information Architecture by Wei Ding and Xia Lin
  
  
• Information Concepts by Gary Marchioninil
  
  
• Information-Seeking Behavior by Raya Fidel
  
  
• Personal Information Management by William Jones
  
  
• Personalization in Information Retrieval by Javed Mostafa
  
  
• Reading and Writing the Electronic Book by Catherine C. Marshall
  
  
• Research and Analysis of Online Social Networks by Fred Stutzman
  
  
• Web Analytics by Bernard J. Jansen