Preface and introduction

and Technology (ARIST) and the first under my editorship. Readers who are new to ARIST and interested in its purpose and evolution may wish to visit the Web site hosted on the homepage of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST), the parent organization (http://www.asis. org/Publications/ARIST/index.html). For the last twentyfive years ARIST has been expertly edited by Professor Martha Williams, to whom we owe a very considerable debt. She has set an exacting benchmark for her successors. A change in editorship is almost invariably accompanied by changes in the product, whether in terms of style, coverage, or design, or all of the foregoing. Connoisseurs of ARIST will quickly notice some of the initial changes, and not all of these, I imagine, will be greeted with unalloyed enthusiasm. Perhaps the most obvious breach with convention is the adoption of the APA (American Psychological Association) referencing style, a move welcomed rapturously, it must be said, by some contributing authors. Since the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST) uses this convention, and since ARIST and JASIST are stablemates with much in common, not least authors, readers, and topic coverage, there seems little reason for ARIST to persist with its rather baroque bibliographic practices: all the more so now that JASIST’s Preface and Introduction