The Invisible Web Weblog

One of the workshops at the 2009 ASIS&T Annual Meeting, is called "The Soft Skills for Academic Library Web Project Managers". According to their announcement : “This workshop is focused on communication, teamwork, and usability for web managers, programmers, technical staff and anyone who may be called upon to manage a web project within the library environment. The main topics include: how to lead a project team, how to design an organizational communication plan, how to involve administrators and others in leadership, how to get constructive input from colleagues, how to evaluate the success of your project management skills.

The journal of "Evidence Based Library and Information Practice" has just published its latest issue, Vol 4, No 3 .

The 18th International Conference on User Modeling, Adaptation and Personalization ( UMAP 2010 ) will take place in Hawaii, June 20-24, 2010. In the conference’s call for submission the topics include the following categories: - Purposes of UMAP: personalizing information, recommending products, tailoring search results, enhancing learning outcomes, personalizing help, assuming routine tasks, adapting interfaces. - User characteristics for UMAP: knowledge and skills, interests and preferences, special needs, affective states, goals and plans, contexts of use, roles, cultural characteristics. - Application domains for UMAP: e-commerce, e-learning, cultural heritage, healthcare, assistive technologies, digital libraries, office work, recommender systems, targeted advertisement, digital TV. - Environments for UMAP: web-based systems (including the semantic/social Web), desktop systems, groupware systems, mobile and wearable systems, smart environments, smart objects, virtual environments....

The 7th International Conference on Information Technology: New Generations will be held in April 12-14, 2010. According to their website the conference’s topics include: Use of information communication technologies for social computing, Mobile social computing, Infrastructure and architectures for social computing, Online communities and social networking, Social tagging and collaborative information organization, Information retrieval and sharing techniques, Usability and user needs, Applications and case studies in social computing, Novel applications supporting user-generated content and social interaction, Social, institutional and policy issues in social computing, Social computing in schools, enterprises and other organizations, Collaboration and social computing and Social computing trends and issues.

The 5th International Conference on Signal Image Technology and Internet Based Systems (SITIS'09) will be held from 29 November to 4 December in Morocco. Various related topics in three tracks form the main theme of this event. These tracks are: Information Management & Retrieval Technologies, Web-Based Information Technologies & Distributed Systems and also Open Source Software Development and Solution.

If future digital devices can not read some of the existing data formats we might lose a huge chunk of human knowledge stored in these unreadable resources. This is the sign of what is called “The Digital Dark Age”. In Wikipedia this term is defined as “ ... a possible future situation where it will be difficult or impossible to read historical documents, because they have been stored in an obsolete digital format. This could cause the period around the turn of the 21st century, when viewed from the future, to be comparable to the Dark Ages in the sense that there will be a relative lack of written record.”

Planets (Preservation and Long-term Access through NETworked Services) will host the second in a series of five three-day training events in Europe in Sofia, Bulgaria, on 16-18 September 2009. ‘ Digital Preservation – The Planets Way ’ will consider the need to preserve digital content, the action that needs to be taken and introduce the Planets approach to addressing these issues. The following quotation from their website justifies the necessity of these kinds of initiatives: “... as more information is created or stored digitally there is a need to take action to preserve digital collections in the same way as there is a need to preserve physical collections of books, journals, images, film, audio and manuscripts. The rapid rate at which technology is evolving and digital material is degraded presents particular challenges about what to preserve, which features to preserve, for how long, for what usage and how to undertake preservation activities”. According to their website the fol...

Library Trends plans for a special issue titled "Involving Users in the Co-Construction of Digital Knowledge in Libraries, Archives, and Museums". In their call for paper they mentioned that: “many libraries, archives, and museums provide their users with social computing environments that include the ability to tag collections, annotate objects, and otherwise contribute their thoughts to the knowledge base of the institution. Information professionals and users have responded to the transition to a web 2.0 world of user-created content by developing open source tools to coordinate these activities and researching the best ways to involve users in the co-creation of digital knowledge ... we seek authors who can step back and think broadly about those issues that are raised when we bring users into the mix in various ways and at various points in the data/information/knowledge life-cycle ... sample questions include, but are certainly not limited to: * How are libraries, archi...

It seems the future direction of the Web and the growth of mobile technology are inevitably integrated. Various mobile ICT devices are widely available in the market and their facilities increase every day. The term "Mobile Web" which has appeared in ICT literature recently, refers to the Web platform and web-based services which are accessible through mobile devices. The future of this trend seems very promising. Of course, there are some limitations that somehow hinder the usability of Mobile Web at present time. For example, mobile devices’ small screen size, limitations in the location of mobile user, lack of windows and limited types of accessible pages in these services are some of the existing challenges for users and designers. For more information you can have a look at the Mobile Web Initiative website.