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Showing posts from November, 2006

Picturesheffield.com

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I was looking for the opening hours of Broomhill library in Sheffield to return a book and while searching for it, I came across Picturesheffield.com which was interesting. The website describes itself as ... “Picturesheffield.com is the Internet version of Sheffield Local Studies Library's computerized image system. This website is only a representative selection from our collections, and most images are pre-1950. The site currently hosts 10,000 pictures from our collections.”

Departmental Club for Photography

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I attended the first meeting of the Departmental Club/Society for photography in the Department of Information Studies in Sheffield. The club is going to be active in different aspects of photography including the way that we can share our ideas and photos and improve our skills of photography. We will soon have a weblog for the club with the photos that members will take or have already taken and like top share them with others. In today meeting each of us showed a photo that we have taken and explained why we like it. I also showed one of the recent photos that I have taken in Sheffield. Moreover, I mentioned this weblog and told the members of the club that I upload different photos to my weblog to make it more colourful and hopefully more interesting for the reader while there is no link between the contents of the entries and the photos next to them.

ICWL 2007

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International Conference on Web-based Learning ( ICWL ) is an annual international conference on web-based learning. ICWL 2007 will be the 6th ICWL conference and held in Edinburgh. Areas of interest include e-Learning Platforms and Tools, Web-based Learning for Oriental Languages, Mobile e-learning, Learning Resource Deployment, Organization and Management, Design, Model and Framework of E-learning Systems, E-learning Standards, Practice and Experience Sharing, and Pedagogical Issues.

LILAC 2007

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LILAC (Librarians' Information Literacy Annual Conference) 2007 will be held at Manchester Metropolitan University from the 26th-28th March 2007. This year's themes are recognising the need, advocacy, marketing and promotion, practical approaches to Information Literacy, Information Literacy and citizenship, new areas for practice and research and Ethical use of information.

JECR on Web Search

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The special issue of Journal of Electronic Commerce Research (JECR) on Web Search and E-Commerce will be published on E-Commerce Web search engines design, evaluation of E-Commerce Web search engines, consumer behaviors studies, cross-cultural comparisons and E-Commerce search effectiveness. For more information please visit the journal website .

Online Information Security

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Online Information Review called fo articles on 'Online Information Security'. The suggested topics include, but are not limited to online shopping security, secure online banking transactions, personal security in the online environment, online trust, maintaining digital document integrity, the world of hacking, controlling viruses and worms, online lures and scams, scam Websites for stealing personal information and new information security threats. For more information please look at thisURL .

SEEK

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SEEK which stands for Sheffield Evidence for Effective and Knowledge is part of the University of Sheffield’s library. This is an example of works that shows how librarians can make a difference in digital age.

Off the Web

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I used to have access to the web at home and always considered it as a bonus. I could not imagine a day without it. It was an indispensable part of my stuff at home. However, recently I do not have access to it at home and interestingly I found it very useful! I just noticed how much time I used to spend on the web. Now I spend that time on reading books which is much more enjoyable.

Evaluation of Digital Libraries

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Library Hi Tech has announced a call for paper for a special issue on the “Evaluation of Digital Libraries". For more information follow the link .

Photos on this Weblog

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I am posting this entry just to clarify some issues about the photos on this weblog. First of all, there is no link between the photos and the contents of each post. Therefore, please do not seek any connection between contents and photos because there isn’t any. I just upload photos to make the weblog somehow colourful and hopefully more interesting. Moreover, over a period of time this weblog has turned to a personal album for me and sometimes I look back and browse the photos which remind me the places that I have been. In addition, all photos on this weblog have been and are taken by me. I bought a digital camera three years ago and since then I have taken more than three to four thousands photos by it. Photos displayed on the weblog form only a small selection of that collection. Most photos have been taken in different parts of Britain and a few in Sweden. I can write a caption for each photo to explain about it, but to be honest I cannot spend any more time on the weblog and jus

Web Science

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Thank to my friend Alireza who informed me about ‘Web Science’. Recently, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Southampton in Britain are going to start a joint research program in Web science. Based on this piece of news in the New York Times, web science “… has social and engineering dimensions. It extends well beyond traditional computer science … to include the emerging research in social networks and the social sciences that is being used to study how people behave on the web … web science … shifts the centre of gravity in engineering research from how a single computer works to how huge decentralized web systems work. In particular I like the quotation form Berners-Lee in the news who said: “The Web isn’t about what you can do with computers … it’s people and, yes, they are connected by computers. But computer science, as the study of what happens in a computer, doesn’t tell you about what happens on the web.”

Teaching Assistants Away Day

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Today I attended the annual teaching assistants away day which our department runs once a year to provide research students and research staff with an opportunity to share their experiences of teaching with each other and also enhance their teaching skills. Just like last year it was a wonderful experience and I enjoyed of participation in all the discussions and I learned a lot from the other participants' views. The workshop was held in the university Staff Development unit and my friend, Peter Stordy who works in our department as a University Teacher and Learning & Teaching Advocate, was the main organizer of it. We explored different issues such as Effective Listening, Effective Feedback, and Problem Management related to teaching. The session was very interactive and everyone did participate in different discussions and debates.

Upcoming Paper

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A journal paper entitled ‘Methodological Approaches in Web Search Research’ written by me and my friend, Dr. Andrew Madden, is going to be published in The Electronic Library, Vol. 25, No.1, which scheduled to appear in February 2007. We developed the paper based on our experience of doing research in the area and a selective review of the past eleven years of research on information seeking on the web . As the title shows we mainly focused on the methodological aspects of research on web searching and tried to depict and overall picture of this issue.

More on INF6350

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My supervisor, Sheila Webber , has posted an entry on her weblog about our joint lecture. We will write more about this issue in the near future.

Social Aspects of the Web

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I was listening to the radio four today morning. It was on the news that Sir Tim Berners-Lee who is the inventor of the web has called for more research on social aspects of the web and asked for further collaboration from researchers in different areas to do more studies on this issue. It means researchers in the technical-oriented camp are acknowledging the importance of the non-technical aspects of the web.

INF6350

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Yesterday I delivered a lecture for MA students of librarianship and MSc. students of information management in the department. I was an invited lecturer for the sixth week of the module of INF6350, Access to Information Resources and Information Literacy. The lecture’s title was ‘Web Searching Behaviour: A Diagnostic Tool”. The lecture went very well. I tried to summarize my four years' journey from the 'invisible web' to 'information visibility' in a simple language. I don't know how successful I was in describing the research for the students but luckily they enthusiastically participated in an exercise which my supervisor and I had been designed to assess their search skills on the web in the light of the model that I developed in my PhD.