Letter from the editors

Abstract

Welcome to another excellent issue of Data Base! It's been an exciting summer, and we're looking forward to an even more interesting Fall and Winter. For instance, we have papers from the Chinese chapter of AIS coming soon. And, we have papers this issue from the very best of the Human Computer Interface research discipline; we agreed to provide SIGHCI with a venue for their best papers, and a good decision it has proven to be! In this issue, premier HCI research: Plummer et al. extend our interest in Web 2.0 technologies to an investigation of Wiki awareness. Many scholars have wondered about the impact of social networking and social information sources on the Internet, but few have questioned what the Web 2.0 functionality would be if it were "aware" of usage patterns. It is provocative enough to think of technology that permits user self-editing; more so, to think of technology of that sort that integrates usage patterns into its response characteristics. Interactivity is taken to yet a new level, and you read it here first! Meanwhile, Ho et al. think that the classic marketing truism of prior experience being the best predictor of future behavior may not pertain in the online world. In specific, they thought that site content closely matched with previous transactions might not be as influential in influencing ongoing site use behavior. Instead, it appears that Web users' personality play considerable influence, moderating the effect of personalized content. Web designers may not be able to rely entirely on stored records of user visits and display content associated with it. Instead, they might have to actually engage in some customer research on the personality characteristics of their users. Wu and Kuo bring us an extension of acceptance research. As well-understood as acceptance is, we probably know little about automatic and non-deliberative use. Technology acceptance is not conceptualized as spontaneous and non-conscious or not effortful. These authors give us new perspectives on usability, from the acceptance theory perspective, with viewpoints not previously seen. Any of us who have seen workstations that utilized multiple screens have probably wondered how they work, if we have not used such configurations ourselves. Truemper et al. bring us an interesting study of the usability of such multiple-monitor workstations. We might tend to think that more than one monitor displaying different information could be potentially distracting. It turns out that users with multi-monitor displays multitask more and achieve higher performance measures than single monitor users. Lastly, we have an errata item in this issue. A table in Henri Barki's fine article about construct conceptualization from our prior issue was omitted. We provide it here, now, with our apologies for the oversight and hope that the omission did not prove unduly inconvenient.