Student Plagiarism in the Online World

A new book entitle "student plagiarism in an online world: problems and solutions" written by Tim Roberts was published recently and covers interesting topics related to this issue such as: "Alternatives to plagiarism, assessing textual plagiarism, assignments that support original work, blogging and plagiarism, contract cheating, contributing factors to online plagiarism, controlling plagiarism, educating students, information revolution, lecturer attitudes toward plagiarism, plagiarism and international students, plagiarism and the community college, plagiarism as an ethical issue, plagiarism detection systems, plagiarism prevention, plagiarism-related behaviors, student perspective of plagiarism, unintentional plagiarism, writing as a developmental skill". For more information please see this link (http://www.igi-pub.com/downloads/pdf/Roberts_brochure.pdf)

Enjoyment of Reading or Suffer of Writing

I have to deal with a constant dilemma in my mind to choose between the enjoyment of reading so many valuable books and other stuff or keep writing to survive in the academic world when we have the motto "publish or perish!". What would you do to cope with this difficulty?

Produsage and Produsers

The increasing growth of the social Web and Web 2.0 has created so many new concepts which are mainly based on the new "User-Led Content Creation" approach. One of these terms is "Produsage" which "...breaks down the boundaries between producers and consumers and instead enables all participants to be users as well as producers of information and knowledge ... produsers engage not in a traditional form of content production, but are instead involved in produsage - the collaborative and continuous building and extending of existing content in pursuit of further improvement." For more information please have a look at this site.

Webometrics: Current Trends and Issues

In the series of panels in conjunction with TIBF, I also attended a panel on Webometrics to discuss the current issues and trends in this area and its links to the related subjects such as bibliometrics, scientometrics, and Informetrics. At the panel I said the fundamental essence of Webometrics is based on the Web's ability on making link between any parts of it regardless of their distance. We also reviewed the challenges and opportunities in this area. The proceedings of the panel will be published soon.

Panels at TIBF

Yesterday I was a member of two specialized panels in conjunction with the Tehran International Book Fair. The first one was about screen reading versus reading on paper. We discussed about the current trends of reading on screen and how it affects people reading behavior. The second panel was about mosque libraries and their services. The details of these panels and our discussions will be published soon.

Library Buildings, Collection Development and etc

These days I have been busy as usual with various LIS related works but these works were somehow different recently. This week I delivered a presentation about the desirable features of library buildings, then contributed to the collection development for my faculty library from Tehran International Book Fair and meanwhile I wrote two book reviews that I was supposed to do ages ago. Luckily, I have done them and should make myself ready for the next week's task including normal teaching, running a workshop and attending a panel at the Tehran International Book Fair.

Non-English Web Retrieval

Journal of Information Retrieval is going to publish a special Issue on "Non-English Web Retrieval". This issue will focus on evaluation, user search behaviour, query log analysis, indexing, information extraction, summarization, user studies, retrieval models, question answering, natural language processing, concept based image retrieval, creation of multi-lingual web collections, intranet/enterprise search, text categorization and clustering and cross language and multilingual retrieval.

Aggregated Search

SIGIR 2008 Workshop on Aggregated Search will take place in July 24, Singapore.

21st TIBF

The 21st Tehran International Book Fair (TIBF) will take place 2 -12 May 2008. For more information please have a look at TIBF website (http://www.tibf.ir/).

Contextualization of Web Searching

Following my previous works on Web Search Research, this paper was recently published in the Electronic Library:

Mansourian, Y. (2008). Contextualization of web searching: a grounded
theory approach, The Electronic Library, Vol. 26 No. 2 pp. 202-214.

Abstract: Purpose – This paper aims to report selective findings of a wider study on interaction of users with web-based search tools to underline the importance of context in information seeking on the web and to introduce some of the contextual elements of web search context.
Design/methodology/approach – A series of intensive and in-depth interviews was carried out with a sample of the Biology Community at the University of Sheffield. Critical Incident Technique (CIT) was employed in the interview protocol and the collected data was inductively analyzed in the light of Grounded Theory approach.
Findings – The results strongly suggest that considering the context of search is a pivotal factor in understanding users' behaviours, feelings, and thoughts during the period of information seeking in an online environment. Five categories have been identified as the main contextual elements which affect search performance of end users. These categories include web users' characteristics; type of the employed search tool; search topic; search situation; and features of the retrieved information resources. Each category has its subcategories which have been illustrated in the paper.
Research limitations/implications – This study was carried out based on a relatively small sample of academia and therefore the results cannot be easily generalized to the wide community of web users. The results of this study should be able to make information literacy education more effective by using information seeking behaviour research discoveries. This study demonstrated that the outcome of any information literacy courses would be more efficient if the contextual factors – which have been identified and illuminated in this study – were considered in the educational agenda.
Originality/value – The study possesses three characteristics that make it different from other studies in the related areas. First of all, it took an in-depth insight to the interaction of end users with the web in real situations. Secondly it focused on a specific targeted group, the academic biology community. Thirdly the study adopted a qualitative approach, in contrast with mainly quantitative web research.

Keywords: Information literacy, Information searches, Qualitative research, Search engines, User interfaces, Worldwide web

Article Type: Research paper, DOI: 10.1108/02640470810864091
Article URL: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/10.1108/02640470810864091