The Invisible Web Weblog

In another LIS job announcement I came across a position entitled “Electronic Resources Manager”. Based on the job advertisement applicants for this position should prepare themselves for the following responsibilities: "tracking and managing subscriptions invoices, licenses, and contracts, maintaining awareness of resources, ensuring timely payments and renewals, tracking cost and allocation for budget purposes, anticipating and preparing annual renewals, prepare annual budget for resources, managing cancellations and additions as needed and also maintain vendor relations, and meet with representatives". This is just another example of the areas that LIS graduates can look for their future career.

Library Hi Tech is going to publish a special issue on technology and digital preservation. According to the journal’s call for paper: “ ... articles should be 4000 to 8000 words long and should be submitted by the end of January, 2010. Library Hi Tech is an ISI-indexed, peer-reviewed scholarly journal published by Emerald".

The latest issue of Evidence Based Library and Information Practice was published. The full text papers are available at the journal's website .

Following my previous posts about the new job titles for librarians, today I saw a job announcement for Repository Librarian who should “ ... support faculty members, students, and staff with information, training, and assistance in depositing digital materials ... communicate with depositors, maintain website and online documentation; work with librarians, faculty, and the heads of the various academic, administrative, and research units on campus to identify materials that would be appropriate to include in the depository system, explain expectations, policies, and workflows, negotiate deposit agreements, provide services, training, and support and investigate and resolve user issues; manage the ingest of materials, including mapping user requirements and metadata to repository functionality and standards; contribute to the planning and development of strategy, functionality, and capacity by gathering and analyzing depositor and user input and feedback; participate in the developmen...

The 2nd International Symposium on Information Management in a Changing World, will be held in Ankara, Turkey, from 22-24 September 2010. The conference’s main theme is “The Impact of Technological Convergence and Social Networks on Information Management”. According the conference’s call for paper, their main topics are: Technological Convergence and Information Management; Social Networks and Web 2.0 Technologies; Convergence, Social Networks and Education; Digital Preservation of Cultural Heritage; Socialization of Information and Convergence; Information Organization; Information Architecture and Information Retrieval; and Interdisciplinary Studies. The narrower areas within the above-mentioned broad fields include many research topics such as: digital information services, digital collection management, web 2.0 and reference services, virtual libraries , M-libraries, Library 2.0, convergence and records management , Web 2.0, Web 3.0 and Semantic Web, incorporating user-created co...

Today morning I delivered a presentation at TMU for faculty members and students, entitled "The Quality of Qualitative Research: Authenticity of Research Process and Research Findings in Qualitative Approach". In this presentation I talked about how the evaluation criteria of research process, like validity and reliability in quantitative studies, have been replaced by new measures such as: trustworthiness, dependability, objectivity, confirmability, transferability, neutrality, interpretative and procedural rigour, and credibility.

The 2nd International Conference on Environmental and Computer Science (ICECS 2009) will take place on December 28-30, 2009, in Dubai. This conference reviews numerous links between various environmental research areas and computer science, from several perspectives. According to their website just some of the topics include: “... global environmental change and ecosystems management, environmental restoration and ecological engineering, environmental sustainability, air pollution and control, solid waste management, water pollution and water quality control, air quality assessment, transport of air pollutants, air pollutant monitoring, waste recycling, ecosystem restoration, ecosystem assessment, urban ecology and many more areas.

The forthcoming special issue of Transactions on Human-Computer Interaction (THCI) is going to focus on “Design Research in HCI”. According to the journal’s call for paper, this issue will include the following topics: "science and/or theories for design in HCI, philosophical foundation of design in HCI, new principles and methods of design in HCI, specific design innovations to support individuals, groups, organizations or societies, design aesthetics, emotional design, affective computing, evaluating and comparing new interactions and interfaces, integration of new technologies in HCI designs, best practices of design in HCI, impacts of mobility and distributed computing in HCI designs, impacts of service-oriented architectures and cloud computing on HCI designs and ethical issues of HCI design". For more information, please visit the journal’s website .

In my next post, I will make a list of new job titles and positions for librarians and LIS professionals. This might be the first step for that content analysis study, which I mentioned before. Perhaps sometime in the future, I'll find a chance to do that study.

I always wanted to do a content analysis of job announcements in the area of LIS, but never found a chance for it, as I have always been too busy with my “To Do List”! I am sure similar studies must have been done by now and their findings should be very interesting. These studies illustrate the qualifications and skills that nowadays’ employers expect from LIS graduates. For example, today in a job announcement I saw the following job description and responsibilities for an Electronic Content Librarian who “will assist with implementing usability and access to digital resources and with developing marketing-communication tools ... primary responsibilities include: perform content analysis and mapping to determine navigation and layout; define workflows, content authoring and review policies; create new graphics and visual designs within existing guidelines; implement RSS feeds and similar notification features; assist with usability testing and translating results into design and org...

Transliteracy Conference will take place on 9 Feb 2010, at the Phoenix Square Digital Media Centre, Leicester. According to the conference website , Transliteracy is “the ability to read, write and interact across a range of platforms, tools and media from signing and orality through handwriting, print, TV, radio and film, to digital social networks.” The conference’s topic include: transliteracy and libraries, transliteracy and the arts, transliteracy in education, transliteracy in communications, transliteracy in the workplace, transliteracy and transdisciplinarity, transliteracy in action - examples of transliterate works, like digital fiction, networked arts projects, or library resources.

The Ubiquitous Learning Conference will be held at the Northeastern University, 5 to 6 December 2009, in Boston. According their website, this conference “... investigates the uses of technologies in learning, including devices with sophisticated computing and networking capacities which are now pervasively part of our everyday lives’ from laptops to mobile phones, games, digital music players, personal digital assistants and cameras. The Conference explores the possibilities of new forms of learning using these devices not only in the classroom, but in a wider range of places and times than was conventionally the case for education.”