The Invisible Web Weblog

I just came back from a wonderful visit of Esfahan, a remarkable historic city in the middle of the county. In 25 May 2009, the main library of the Esfahan University held a one day seminar about the visible and invisible web. I was one of the invited speakers and I delivered a one hour presentation entitled “The Visibility and Invisibility of Information on the Web”. It was a brief summary of my studies on the invisible web concept over the last eight years. At the end of the seminar, I also took part in a panel to answer the participants’ questions. I can summarize my main message to the seminar simply as follows: “ … in my theory of information visibility on the web, I basically put the web user in the focal point of the definition of the invisible web and also consider the search context’s effects in the level of information visibility for each search session. This approach is considerably different with the common definition of this concept which is only focused on search engines’...

The National Federation of Advanced Information Services (NFAIST), with the support of the iSchool at Drexel University, is organizing a one-day meeting "Google, the Web, and the Future Roles of Publishers and Librarians" which will take place on June 26, 2009 at Drexel University. For more information you can see this link .

Tehran International Book Fair ( TIBF ) is much greater than an exhibition place for new publications. In conjunction with the book fair, various cultural activities take place every year, that I have a chance to contribute in a few of them in this year. In its the third day, I was member of a panel to discuss on the "Popularization of Science and Its Challenges". In the seventh day, I did run a workshop on "The Basics of Paper Writing". Brief reports of these events are available here and here .

First Monday published the May 2009 (volume 14, number 5) issue. To see the table of contents and full text of the papers, please follow the link .

Information Processing & Management journal is going to publish a special issue on Collaborative Information Seeking. According to their call for paper “… collaborative information seeking refers to occasions when pairs or groups of people actively work together to satisfy a shared information need. Such collaborations may be synchronous or asynchronous, co-located or remote. … understanding how digital technologies can improve the process and outcomes of collaborative information seeking is an emerging area of research engaging several communities, including researchers in the fields of information retrieval, library sciences, education, human-computer interaction, and computer-supported cooperative work.”