2009 ASIS&T Annual Meeting

The preliminary program for the ASIST Annual Meeting, “Thriving on Diversity - Information Opportunities in a Pluralistic World”, which will take place in November in Vancouver, Canada, is now available at: http://www.asis.org/Conferences/AM09/

Image Indexing and Retrieval

The Canadian Journal of Information and Library Science is going to publish a special issue on “Image Indexing and Retrieval: Challenges and New Perspective”. This issue will focus on various aspects of digital image perception, understanding, indexing, and retrieval. The themes are: Image indexing strategies within an information retrieval context, Social computing, image tagging and folksonomies, Methods, models, and theories applicable to image research, Image users and uses, Cognitive aspects of image perception and understanding, Cross-Language Image Retrieval, Content-Based Image Retrieval (CBIR).

The CAB Thesaurus

The CAB Thesaurus, the largest life sciences and related topics thesaurus in the world, is now available online at http://www.cabi.org/cabthesaurus/. Key features include: Controlled vocabulary that has been in constant use since 1983, Regularly updated (current version released January 2009), Broad coverage of pure and applied life sciences, technology and social sciences, Approximately 96,000 terms, including 64,000 preferred terms and 32,000 non-preferred terms, Includes about 62,000 plant, animal and microorganism names, Multi-lingual, with Spanish and Portuguese equivalents for most English terms, American and British spelling variants, Relevant CAS registry numbers for chemicals, and Commission notation for enzymes.

Invisible Web Seminar In Esfahan

I just came back from a wonderful visit of Esfahan, a remarkable historic city in the middle of the county. In 25 May 2009, the main library of the Esfahan University held a one day seminar about the visible and invisible web. I was one of the invited speakers and I delivered a one hour presentation entitled “The Visibility and Invisibility of Information on the Web”. It was a brief summary of my studies on the invisible web concept over the last eight years. At the end of the seminar, I also took part in a panel to answer the participants’ questions. I can summarize my main message to the seminar simply as follows: “ … in my theory of information visibility on the web, I basically put the web user in the focal point of the definition of the invisible web and also consider the search context’s effects in the level of information visibility for each search session. This approach is considerably different with the common definition of this concept which is only focused on search engines’ functionality and overlooks the vital role of the user and the search context.”

The Future Roles of Publishers and Librarians

The National Federation of Advanced Information Services (NFAIST), with the support of the iSchool at Drexel University, is organizing a one-day meeting "Google, the Web, and the Future Roles of Publishers and Librarians" which will take place on June 26, 2009 at Drexel University. For more information you can see this link.

Academic Writing and Popularization of Science

Tehran International Book Fair (TIBF) is much greater than an exhibition place for new publications. In conjunction with the book fair, various cultural activities take place every year, that I have a chance to contribute in a few of them in this year. In its the third day, I was member of a panel to discuss on the "Popularization of Science and Its Challenges". In the seventh day, I did run a workshop on "The Basics of Paper Writing". Brief reports of these events are available here and here.

First Monday

First Monday published the May 2009 (volume 14, number 5) issue. To see the table of contents and full text of the papers, please follow the link.

Collaborative Information Seeking

Information Processing & Management journal is going to publish a special issue on Collaborative Information Seeking. According to their call for paper “… collaborative information seeking refers to occasions when pairs or groups of people actively work together to satisfy a shared information need. Such collaborations may be synchronous or asynchronous, co-located or remote. … understanding how digital technologies can improve the process and outcomes of collaborative information seeking is an emerging area of research engaging several communities, including researchers in the fields of information retrieval, library sciences, education, human-computer interaction, and computer-supported cooperative work.”

Two Recent Conferences

Recently, I was member of the scientific committees at two national conferences in LIS. The first one, “Knowledge Management and Information Science: Links and Interactions” took place last week.
The second one is a national conference entitled “School Libraries: Dynamism of the Educational System and Contribution in Learning and Teaching” which is being held now. The increasing number of specialized conferences in LIS in Iran is a sign of the dynamism of this field in the country.

Current Trends in Publishing LIS Books

I had an interview with IBNA about the current trends in publishing LIS books in Iran. The full transcription of this interview is available here.

How to Make Sense of Qualitative Data

Yesterday, I delivered a presentation at our university about the
basics of data analysis and interpretation in qualitative research and
how we can make sense of piles of notes and raw materials in our
studies to present meaningful and comprehensible results. The
presentation's title was "How to Make Sense of Qualitative Data in
Qualitative Studies". If you like to see the PowePoint file please
send me an email.

WWW 2009

The 18th International World Wide Web Conference will take place in Madrid, for more details follow the link.

LIS Curricula and New Skills

In another interview with IBNA, I referred to the necessity of keeping LIS curricula abreast on the rapid changes in the filed. The full transcription of this interview is available here.

Research 2.0

Research 2.0: Web 2.0 and Virtual Worlds as Research Environments will take place in January 5-8, 2010, in Hawaii. The main topics are: changing landscape for qualitative and quantitative research due to emergence of Web 2.0 and virtual worlds; development of online research communities; online collaborative techniques in Web 2.0 environments for advancing research methodologies; use of Web 2.0 tools and technologies in data collection and analyses; use of Web 2.0 platforms and virtual worlds (e.g., Second Life) such as avatars, online communities, for conducting qualitative and quantitative research; effectiveness of Web 2.0 for increasing participating rates in research (e.g., questionnaire response rates; online focus groups); using user-generated content as a data source in research; ethical and legal issues (e.g., privacy; copyright) in conducting qualitative and quantitative research in virtual environments; use of social computing in building research communities; role of social computing in the advancement of data collection techniques; new data collection approaches in Web 2.0 environments.

Qualitative Studies in LIS Research

Recently I had another interview with IBNA on the issue of existing approaches in LIS research. In this interview, I mentioned that until now most of the LIS studies in the country have been adopting quantitative approaches and we need to do more research with qualitative methods to make a reasonable balance between these two paradigms. You can see the full transcription of the interview on IBNA website at here.