The Invisible Web Weblog

Recently I have published an article in Persian which is basically a viewpoint rather than a research paper. The title is: “100 Features of a Good Academic Library” and it was published in Ketab-e Mah-e Kolliyat (No. 126). This paper is based on my general idea and experience in LIS subject as a librarian and LIS lecturer during the recent years. I have organized the contents in 10 sections and each section consists of 10 sub-sections in a Likert scale. In the best situation a library’s score will be 500. I do not claim these features are comprehensive or can be considered as a framework. I only say these criteria can be taken into account for evaluation of academic libraries in general and for identification of areas for further improvement accordingly.

Now Information Literacy has an international logo which has been introduced to the world a few days ago at the UNESCO session of the IFLA conference. The logo was designed by Edgar Luy Pérez and according to this website : "The logo communicates, in a simple way, the human ability to both search and access information, not only through traditional means, but also through the use of ICT (Information and Communication Technologies), as it uses graphic resources known all over the world, such as the book and the circle. The first one symbolizes study, and the second, knowledge and information, which today are made more available through informatics, showing with this that its social aim is to communicate. The book, open and next to the circle, comprises with it a visual metaphor representing those people who have the cognitive tools to reach information in a nimble way, as well as the desire to share this ability."

The School of Information and Library Science at the University of North Carolina will run its second digital curation curriculum symposium entitled " DigCCurr 2009: Digital Curation Practice, Promise and Prospects ". This is part of the Preserving Access to Our Digital Future: Building an International Digital Curation Curriculum (DigCCurr) project. According to their announcement, the primary goals of the project are to develop a graduate‐level curricular framework, course modules, and experiential components to prepare students for digital curation in various environments. Based on the definition in Wikipedia digital curation is the curation, preservation, maintenance, and collection and archiving of digital assets and is the process of establishing and developing long term repositories of digital assets for current and future reference by researchers, scientists, and historians, and scholars generally. Digital curation entails collecting verifiable digital assets, providi...

The current issue of the Program: Electronic Library and Information Systems (Vol. 42, No. 3) is a special issue on Web 2.0 and social networking. You will find useful information on social software and libraries, Second Life, new generation of catalogues for the new generation of users, use of Web 2.0 technologies in LIS education, digital libraries and repositories, implementation of open source library management systems and so on.

"Search Interfaces on the Web: Querying and Characterizing" is a PhD thesis by Denis Shestakov, in the Department of Information Technology at the University of Turku in Finland. This study is an example of the recent technical-oriented studies on the Deep Web. More details about this work including the abstract and the full text are available here .

The forthcoming issue of Knowledge Management for Development Journal will focus on collaborative learning: the role of organisational knowledge. For more information please see www.km4dev.org/journal.

" Making the Web Work for Science: The Impact of e-Science and the Cyberinfrastructure " is a workshop at the Library of Congress on Monday, December 8, 2008.

The Carolinas Chapter of the American Society for Information Science and Technology will run a workshop called "Pushing Boundaries in Information Visualization: Using Virtual, Immersive and Interactive Technologies in Research & Practice" on Saturday, September 13, 2008. For more information please see this URL .

I had a presentation at the University of Sheffield in 13 August as part of a seminar organized by the Centre for Information Literacy Research. In my talk entitled “Implications of the Information Visibility Model in Information Literacy Research and Practice”, I briefly described selective findings of two follow-up studies after my PhD research to see how useful the model of information visibility can be for future researchers in the area of information seeking on the Web and how web users can reflect on their search outcomes based on the model. The applicability of this model in enhancing end users’ information literacy skills was one of the focal points of the speech and I suggested a number of possible lines of research for further investigations based on the concept of information visibility and end users’ conceptualizations of their success and failure in Web searching. For more information you can download the PowerPoint file form this address .

HCIR 2008 aims to make more links between Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval and will take palce in 23 Oct 2008, Redmond, WA. According to their website "... This year the workshop is focused on the design, implementation, and evaluation of search interfaces. We are particularly interested in interfaces that support complex and exploratory search tasks."

The 8th Annual Research Symposium of ASIST Special Interest Group: Information Needs, Seeking & Use is about the "Future Directions: Information Behavior in the Design & Making of Relevant Research" and will be held in October 25, 2008, in Columbus, Ohio. For more information please see this link .

The Seventh Annual Workshop on HCI Research in MIS will take place in December 13, 2008 in Paris, France. For more information please see this link .