The Invisible Web Weblog

Second International Conference on Self-Adaptive and Self-Organizing ( SASO ) System will take place in Venice, Italy, October 20-24, 2008.

The second Library Assessment Conference: Building Effective, Sustainable, and Practical Assessment, to be held in Seattle, Washington, August 4-6, 2008. Based on their call for paper and poster, the conference planning committee is especially interested in contributions that show how assessment results have been used to improve library services and add value to the user community. For more information you can follow this link .

Libraries in the Digital Age ( LIDA ) 2008 will take place in Dubrovnik and Mljet, Croatia from 2-7 June. According to their website, LIDA addresses the changing and challenging environment for libraries and information systems and services in the digital world. Its themes in this year are education and training in digital libraries and reference in digital environments.

ACM 2008 Conference on Computer Supported Cooperative Work ( CSCW 2008 ) sponsored by the ACM Special Interest Group on Computer-Human Interaction (SIGCHI) will be held in San Diego, California, 8-12, November 2008.

If you are interested in inquiry-based education, " The Inquiry Page " might be a good place to begin. They introduce their portal as "... a dynamic virtual community where inquiry-based education can be discussed, resources and experiences shared, and innovative approaches explored in a collaborative environment."

I was away for a few days and just came back from a short winter holiday yesterday. Five days being away from the online world was long enough to miss it. Here is still cold and everywhere is covered by ice and snow.

The third issue of Journal of Information Literacy ( JIL ) was published recently. JIL is an international, open access and peer-reviewed journal that investigates Information Literacy within a wide range of settings. If you have English papers about information literacy this journal might be a good place to publish your work.

Journal of Digital Information ( JoDI ) is an open access journal in LIS. In its upcoming special issue on Digital Libraries and User-Generated Content, the journal is going to explore a number of related topics such as " ... use of Web 2.0 technologies in digital libraries, mobile services in digital libraries, supporting digital library infrastructure and architecture, information retrieval and mining techniques, virtual worlds and digital libraries, user communities, usability and user needs, novel interfaces supporting user-generated content and social, institutional and policy issues". For more information please see the journal website .

I think the opportunities for LIS researchers in terms of the interdisciplinary nature of this field are endless. For example, in information services in libraries we have the issue of services for special groups. These groups can be special for any reason. Accordingly, the link between information services and their specific features can be researched. For instance, children who have Attention Deficit Hyper Activity Disorder can be considered as a special group in a library which requires specific facilities for them. We know little about these kinds of library users and how librarians can help them or their parents. As a result, I think there are plenty of opportunities for research in this area.

When Wikipedia began its work a few years ago, no one could imagine how successful it might be. At present time it contains 2,172,588 articles in English and covers so many areas. Now this is a ready reference source for almost everything. During recent years, I have used it for several reasons and have found so much information through it. Wikipedia is really useful to get general overview about everything and anything.

Recently, I posted an entry about the new roles of librarians. In this post I would like to refer to another type of these new roles. The Digital Production Librarian is a post in which the successful candidate will serve as an expert on digitization standards and best practices for all formats; establish and maintain digital conversion best practices for all formats; implement digitization project workflows; schedule and oversee digitization projects; and supervise digitization staff. The essential functions for this post are: "... manage the operations of the Digital Production Centre, purchase, maintain and update digitization hardware and software, collaborate with library staff and college faculty to select appropriate materials, design and implement project workflows, schedule digitization projects, provide written progress reports on digital projects, determine digitization cost for each project, identify digital storage needs and recommend storage medium, and maintain docu...

Among all emails I receive everyday form different discussion lists; I saw an announcement of an opening post for Web developer/reference librarian. A quick look at the responsibilities and the required qualifications for this post confirms the changing roles of librarians in the recent years. They look for someone who can create and maintain web as well as providing regular references services. Some of his responsibilities are: "develops and maintains web pages, provides reference services through regular duty at the reference desk and by responding to virtual information requests using a wide variety of databases, develops graphics and PowerPoint presentations for staff, stays abreast of the information needs and trends within the areas of economic development, and development organization; stays abreast of trends in library and information science and web development. Some of the required qualifications are: "at least 4 years experience with Web development & managemen...

This is a real winter here. It has been snowing since yesterday and by now everywhere is covered by snow which is very nice. However, the weather is so cold and it is difficult to walk or drive. I just post this entry today to remember how cold it is now and not complain in summer about the high temperature!

If I want to describe my academic life in 2007 by words, it will be something like this: Teaching, ILISA, invisible web, grounded theory, information literacy, academic writing, database design, web searching, information seeking, evaluation of information, reference services, e-learning, research methods, qualitative research, knowledge management, thesauri, ontologies, statistics, strategic plans in research, blogging, educational roles of libraries, Dublin core, metadata, Recall and Precision, IR, user-oriented studies, fuzzy logic, webometrics, and learning. You might ask how on earth these concepts may connect to each other?! This is exactly my question too!

Happy New Year to everyone! Today I made a new folder in my PC for 2008. It means the new year arrived. In terms of blogs and blogsphere, this is the fifth year that I am blogging. Although my first weblog which was created in 2003 disappeared in 2005, I did not give up and made this weblog in 2005. I had a very busy year in 2007 but in general I am happy that I managed to survive!