Monday 31 December

I have spent all day in librarian mode – organising references and tidying up where I have got to so far. This is a little bit like colouring in revision timetables, in that it feels useful but doesn’t really get one on any further. However, as a good librarian I know that the more structure I put around my literature searching at these very early stages, the easier it will be to find and cross reference articles later. Noting why I think something is or isn’t relevant now will no doubt be very useful six or twelve months down the line when whatever reasons I had today have been lost in the mists of time.

I have generated a number of topic areas from the articles I’ve found from my less structured ‘Oh that looks interesting and I wonder if it’s subsequently been cited’ searching over the last couple of days. Well, it is holiday time.

So far, then, the literature I’ve found falls into one or more of the following categories:

• Traditional authority/ hierarchy and the internet
• Website usability and evaluation (but not yet found anything that looks at religious websites, it’s all ecommerce)
• Surveys and predictions (the Future of the Internet, as seen from 1995)
• Descriptions/ analysis of online religion and virtual communities
• Cross cultural comparisons
• Comparative areas – e.g. health websites/ public organisations/ PR
• Church use of the internet (this is the smallest pool so far and I wish it was the largest!)