The Invisible Web Weblog

I installed WordNet on my PC and found it very interesting in many ways. Just in case you do not know about this, according to Wikipedia "WordNet is a semantic lexicon for the English language. It groups English words into sets of synonyms called synsets, provides short, general definitions, and records the various semantic relations between these synonym sets. The purpose is twofold: to produce a combination of dictionary and thesaurus that is more intuitively usable, and to support automatic text analysis and artificial intelligence applications. The database and software tools can be downloaded and used freely." You can download the software from this site

At the recent monthly meeting of ILISA I learned more about European Foundation for Quality Management (EFQM) and found it a useful framework to enhance the quality of services in libraries. I think this is a fruitful area for further research and practice in LIS. Based on this website : " The EFQM Excellence Model is a practical tool that can be used in various ways: as a tool for Self-assessment, as a way to benchmark with other organisations, as a guide to identify areas for improvement, as the basis for a common vocabulary and a way of thinking, and also as a structure for the organisation's management system."

Recently I was teaching the concept of "relevance" in one of my lectures and at the end I said: Relevance is so relevant to LIS and without relevance LIS will be so irrelevant. This is my ultimate thought about relevance!

I attended a conference in Tehran on last Wednesday about Medical Library and Information Science (MLIS). The main topics which were covered at the conference were: MLIS History, MLIS Education, Information Needs of Medical Staff, Information Organization in Medical Resources, Medical Community and Health Sciences Information Professional, Tools for Information Storage and Retrieval in MLIS, Medical Databases, Interdisciplinary Nature of MLIS, and MLIS Associations. I was one of the referees at the conference and also a member of the panel in one session. The great participation and contribution of MLIS and LIS students at the conference was very encouraging for me.

" Repository 4 Iranian Researchers " is an open access database to provide free web-based access to the bibliographic information of some publications by Iranian authors in scientific subjects around the world. For further information please have a look at this site .

Recently in one of my university lectures I was teaching the concepts of Recall and Precision to my students. As you might know these concepts are used by IR researchers to assess the search performance of various IR systems. In my lecture I highlighted the fact that regarding the intrinsic complexity in the relevance concept our calculation of Recall and Precision will always be problematic. I think to address this issue we can consider it form a contextual approach. As a result, for any system we might be able to consider new measures which I'd like to call "Contextual Recall and Precision" which not only shows the performance of the system, but also contains the contextual elements which can potentially affect our measurement. The only dilemma here is the way we use to identify the important contextual elements and how we attribute each one's role in the final Recall and Precision.

A two day conference about Reference Services and Information Science is taking place at the National Library. This event is mainly organized by the Union of Iranian Library and Information Science Students Associations ( ADKA ). The conference's theme is about using new technologies in reference work and exploring new methods to enhance our services in various libraries. Yesterday I attended there as a member of the panel in the last session. The second day of the conference is being held today at the same venue. It was very encouraging for me that the event was held mainly by LIS students from different universities. They are doing very well in team working and I am optimistic about the success of their future activities.

Yesterday I was in Shiraz, a great city in south of Iran, to attend the monthly ILISA meeting and also to visit the Regional Information Centre for Science & Technology . This centre is one of the pioneer institutions in providing universities and researchers with scientific information. The centre has been active in many areas of collecting, organizing and dissemination of scholarly information recourses during recent years. They develop many databases such as English abstracts of Persian papers, Persian E-Articles, Persian E-journals, Persian E-books and Persian Journal Citation Reports. They also offer document delivery cervices for the academic libraries. During this visit I met many colleagues from the ILISA branches and it was very encouraging to see all LIS progress that we can see in Iran during the current years.