The Invisible Web Weblog

This is just a link to the presentations’ slides of ALISS One Day Conference in 23rd August 2006 entitled “ Meeting the Challenge of the Google Generation - Technology or Training? ”

One of my young friends in Sheffield has been awarded an excellent award from the University of Sheffield for his achievements in Science. For more details see this link . I would like to congratulate Koorosh on his success.

I think Clusty works more efficiently than other general-purpose search engines at present time. I like it because of the clustering method that it employs to present the search result. It seems very useful to me.

I am writing this post in the memory of a good friend, Mr. Mohammad Ali Khaksari, who was a real librarian with all desirable characteristics that an excellent librarian should have. Mr. Khaksari was one of my colleagues at the Main Library of Ferdowsi University in Mashhad who sadly passed away two days ago. I heard the sad news yesterday through the Iranian LIS discussion group and it was difficult for me to believe it. He was very humble with a great personality and so enthusiastic about librarianship. His commitment to a long period of hard work in that library, for more than 30 years, was admirable. He had a degree in philosophy and long time experience in different aspects of library science in general and cataloguing in particular. Mr. Khaksari was one of the pioneers in adopting LC classification method in Iranian academic libraries. His services to the library science in Iran will always be remembered. God bless him.

29th Annual International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research & Development on Information Retrieval is being held in Seattle from sixth to eleventh of August. The conference program is available here . Two years ago SIGIR 2004 was held in Sheffield and I was involved there as one of the volunteer students. It was a wonderful conference and I learned many things through attending the main conference and some of the workshops.

I just came across a paper that has been developed by Sergey Brin and Larry Page, founders of Google, when they both were PhD students at Stanford University in 1998. In their paper they acknowledged the big challenge of indexing the web and explained: “... how to build a practical large-scale system which can exploit the additional information present in hypertext. Also ... how to effectively deal with uncontrolled hypertext collections where anyone can publish anything they want.” Perhaps in that time they had not predicted such a huge success for Google. In fact, their wonderful search engine showed that addressing the above questions in the real search environment is an achievable task. Although all search engines including Google are still far from perfection, Google certainly does a great job and it deserves its popularity.

Peter Williams’ opinion about the role of information literacy has been published on the CILIP website. He has expressed his disillusionment with the real role of information literacy. In this argument he claimed that the necessity of information literacy has been overestimated by experts in this area and we all need to rethink about the ‘underlying tenets of the information literacy’. If you like to read the full text of this debate please click here .

There is a CFP for 2006 Research Symposium of the Special Interest Group on Human-Computer Interaction of ASIS&T. The symposium will be held in November 1, 2006 at Hilton Austin. There is an interesting description about the difference between the concept of in HCI and in ATMs which explains why HCI is so important in information science. "Unlike the interactivity coupled with ATMs, online ticket purchasing and accounting systems, the interactivity associated with information-intensive environments demands complex tools, innovative forms of interaction, and novel ways of visualizing and representing content. In this context, the study of human computer interaction (HCI) is unique due to the focus on interactions among people, content and systems. This half-day Symposium aims to rejuvenate the use and study of HCI within the information science context."

'Digital Preservation Management: Short-Term Solutions to Long-Term Problems' will take place in October 1-6, 2006 at the Cornell University Library. Their website introduces the aims and objectives of the workshop as follows: "The Digital Preservation Management workshop series is intended for those who are contemplating or implementing digital preservation programs in libraries, archives, and other cultural institutions. The goals of this initiative are to foster critical thinking in a technological realm and to provide the means for exercising practical and responsible stewardship of digital assets. "