classification still provides a general overview of the book as it can be thought of as having had a voting procedure applied to it(i.e. it lists those issues that are of sufficient
significance that they are mentioned in more than one chapter),although such anoperational definition of ”significance” must, of course, be treated with caution.
the other reason for presenting the hypertext semantic net isthat it allows us to comment on the computer tool we really needed for this part of the editors’’ task. had we had all the chap-ters
on-line, and a simple hypertext shell such as guide then we could have been even more thorough and complete in ourcrossreferencing. furthermore, what we needed most was a string searching
capability, since though we had marked page numbers as well as chapters on our original list of possible cross-refer-ences, we spent many hours searching for the ”right” cross reference.
finally, on behalf of the editors, we would like to thank the authors for their time and effort, and linda schofield of springer-verlag, who has helped considerably, both with this book and
with establishing the cscw book series.