The Invisible Web Weblog

If you look for an accredited open access journal in the area of medical informatics then JMLA (Journal of the Medical Library Association) might be a good source for you. The journal covers a wide variety of topics in LIS including information literacy. For example, " Integrating information literacy into the education of public health professionals: roles for librarians and the library " written by Laura Cobus is an example of papers on information literacy in the current issue of the journal (January 2008).

DoIS (Documents in Information Science) is a useful service for searching and downloading research results in Information Science. In fact, DoIS is a web-based database of articles and conference proceedings published in electronic format in the area of LIS.

The International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO) will hold its 10th International ISKO Conference in Montréal, Canada, August 5th-8th 2008. The Conference theme is culture and identity in knowledge organization. The proposed research topics for this edition include: epistemological foundations in KO, models and methods, systems and tools, ethics, KO for libraries, archives, and museums, non-textual materials, KO in multilingual environments, users and social context.

Nowrouz is the beginning of the new Iranian year in 21th of March every year. I say Happy New Year to everyone and wish you the best for the coming year. Today is the last working day of this year for most people and we have a few days off. I was very busy during this year but thankfully pretty successful at the end. I was mainly involved in teaching and teaching-related activities at the university.

Recently I was the referee for a promotion presentation at a research centre which was about developments of standards for e-journals. Regarding the increasing number of e-journals and the current diversity in their formats I also think this is the time to think about the development of widely accepted standards to facilitate the publication and usage of these resources.

The "Science of the Web" is a new interdisciplinary area of research and practice which is going to investigate how the WWW affects various aspects of our life and how we should react to the web-based developments. The website of The Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI) introduces it as "... to facilitate and produce the fundamental scientific advances necessary to inform the future design and use of the World Wide Web."

In this semester I teach a variety of modules including "Library Services for Children" which is an interesting topic to learn more about it. In this module I try to talk about various criteria to develop library collections for children and how to choose the most appropriate materials for them. Also we discuss on specific services that a library can offer to enhance children's reading skills and provide them with facilities to make them interested to libraries. I also try to introduce various online resources that can be helpful in this issue. For instance, International Children’s Digital Library and the Association for Library Service to Children. ( ALSC )

Everyday we come across new concepts which emerge as a result of current advances and developments in ICT world. For example, Digital Preparedness is a quite new measure to show how prepare a society is to employ digital facilities in various aspects of life. Likewise, e-readiness is another concept which is somehow similar and in someway different with Digital Preparedness, but to serve the same purpose. Nevertheless, these concepts are in macro level and to calculate them we need to identify and evaluate other measurable features such as Digital Opportunity Index (DOI) and Networked Readiness Index (NRI). The inherent difficulty of assessing these concepts comes to the difficulty of measuring the cultural and social context of each society which inevitably affects them.

A reporter from IBNA (Iran Book News Agency) has recently done an interview with me about the social role of public libraries and how these libraries can contribute in providing various information services for its users. We also talked about LIS education and how we should keep our LIS curriculum abreast with the current advances in ICT. The interview's transcript is available on IBNA interviews section.

Recently I was the internal examiner for a master dissertation in educational technology about the impact of access to and use of ICT facilities on universities' educational and research performance. The result just was a confirmation of the previous studies that there is a direct and significant link between these factors. It was the forth dissertation that I assessed during this academic year.

Two days ago(1st of March) I attended the ILISA Annual Meeting at the National Library's main conference hall. It was our annual General Assembly to report the ILISA's various activities during the last year. We also had some well-known speakers at the meeting, recently retired LIS lecturers and a panel of Iranian LIS eminent professors. Moreover, it was a wonderful opportunity to meet old friends and colleagues as many people from different parts of the country had come along.