The Invisible Web Weblog

I published a Persian article about the essential characteristics of a good research paper. In this article, I describe 20 elements/sections that research papers usually have. For each element, I introduced at least one functionality and five features, which all together include 100 characteristics. These main 20 elements/sections are: originality, title, abstract, keywords, introduction, problem statement, aims and objectives, research questions, literature review, research site, methodology, research tools, research population, limits and limitations, results/findings, discussion/conclusion, further research, acknowledgement, references/bibliography and appendices. If you want to have a copy of the paper, please email me.

I am writing a brief viewpoint paper about the dynamism vs. stasis in research approach. In this paper I try to explain that almost all sorts of studies are, or at least should be, dynamic and flexible in terms of their direction and scope. By dynamism in research, I mean we are not able to prepare all steps and predict all aspects of a research project in advance. This is somehow inevitable in qualitative and exploratory studies, and the researcher has to follow the new directions which appear during the course of research. The emergent horizons in research provide us with great opportunities for more creativity and innovation. Of course, this change of direction doesn’t mean that we should easily forget the initial research aims and objectives. It only shows the fundamental flexibility in the nature of research. I’ll explain this issue in the future posts in more details.

Journal of Documentation began its 66th year of publication by its first issue in 2010. The papers appeared in this issue are: Turning weakness into strength: strategies for future LIS, The information needs of UK historic houses: mapping the ground, Developing scales for information-seeking behaviour, Source preference criteria in the context of everyday projects: Relevance judgments made by prospective home buyers, Grounded theory in practice: issues and discussion for new qualitative researchers, Information behaviour of women: theoretical perspectives on gender, Information Literacy 2.0: hype or discourse refinement?

Australasian Digital Theses ( ADT ) is another example of open access services for dissertations and theses. According to their website: “ ... the program has two major components, digitisation of theses as part of the deposit process and the digitisation of a selected number of frequently requested existing theses ... each university is responsible for maintaining an archival copy of the theses of their own institution ... the participants will use the same database configuration, standards and metadata system to ensure compatibility.”

The first issue of Library Hi Tech in 2010 was published. This issue includes 11 papers about various topics such as: interoperability of open access repositories, using institutional repository to address local-scale needs, Web 2.0 applications in Chinese university libraries, evaluating open source GIS for libraries, open source software deployment in the public sector, evaluating Iranian newspapers’ websites using correspondence analysis, using the Robots.txt and Robots meta tags to implement online copyright and a related amendment, clickers in instruction: one campus, multiple perspectives, "Power Tags" in information retrieval, the use of handheld mobile devices: their impact and implications for library services, and research for practice: avoiding useless results.

Electronic Thesis Online Service ( EThOS ) is a new web-based database developed by the British Library which provides access to more than 250,000 theses from UK universities.

Yesterday I was the external examiner for a doctorial thesis in LIS. It was about the evaluation of user interface in Persian web-based digital libraries. Being an examiner, is a good opportunity to review all the required features that we usually expect of a thesis. I did my assessment in seven levels including: originality of the topic, links with the literature body, soundness of the methodology, value of the findings, thoroughness of the analysis, applicability of the results, and coherence and consistency of the thesis. While I was reading this thesis, in the past few days, I was thinking about what makes a PhD thesis different from a master dissertation. In summary, I think a doctorial thesis should have all the required characteristics of a master dissertation, along with five main distinctive aspects including: an original topic, a comprehensive and an analytical literature review, a sound and rigorous methodology, a deep and thorough analysis of the collected data, and finally...

Making Metadata Work Harder: Celebrating 15 Year of Dublin Core is the international conference on Dublin Core and metadata applications which will take place on 20-22 October 2010, in Pittsburgh. This event’s topics include: metadata principles, guidelines, and best practices, metadata quality, normalization, improvement and mapping, conceptual models and frameworks (e.g., RDF, DCAM, OAIS), metadata interoperability across domains, languages, time, structures, and scales, cross-domain metadata uses (e.g., recordkeeping, preservation, curation, institutional repositories, publishing), domain metadata (e.g., for corporations, cultural memory institutions, education, government, and scientific fields), bibliographic standards (e.g., RDA, FRBR, subject headings) as Semantic Web vocabularies, accessibility metadata, metadata for scientific data, e-Science and grid applications, social tagging and user participation in building metadata, Knowledge Organization Systems (e.g., ontologies, t...

The International Journal of Computer Supported Cooperative Work is going to publish a special issue on Knowledge Management in Action . The main topics for this issue are: “organizational strategies to enact and promote KM within organizations, and their relation with ICT technology, various kinds of knowledge, application domains, organizational structures, and their implication on KM, methods and approaches for the design of KM solutions, techniques and technologies for a sustainable KM (CSCW-based approaches, web-based approaches, etc.), critical success factors for KM socio-technical solutions, evaluation of KM applications in real situations, lessons-learned in each phase of the KM application life-cycle, from conception up to continuous adaptation, critical comparison of technologies, field studies and strategies in KM and any other perspective contributing to a better understanding of KM in action.

Information Seeking in Context ( ISIC ) 2010 will take place in the Faculty of Letters, University of Murcia, September 28, 2010 – October 2, 2010. According to their call for paper, the conference main themes include: "theories and models of information seeking and searching, research approaches and methodologies, information seeking, searching and use in specific contexts, organizational structures and processes and information seeking, searching and use, information seeking and searching in virtual social networks, information behaviour in everyday life, integrating studies on information seeking and interactive retrieval, information use and the nature of information and how information is used to help solve problems, aid decision making or satisfy an initial need, the mediation of information behaviour, the design of information delivery systems to meet information needs generally, or in organizational or disciplinary contexts, including Web 2.0 developments, information seek...

The 33rd Annual ACM SIGIR Conference will take place 19-23 July 2010, in Geneva, Switzerland. According to their call for paper, the conference’s topics include: “Document Representation and Content Analysis (e.g., text representation, document structure, linguistic analysis, non-English IR, cross-lingual IR, information extraction, sentiment analysis, clustering, classification, topic models, facets, clustering, classification, topic models, facets), Queries and Query Analysis (e.g., query representation, query intent, query log analysis, question answering, query suggestion, query reformulation), Users and Interactive IR (e.g., user models, user studies, user feedback, search interface, summarization, task models, personalized search), Retrieval Models and Ranking (e.g., IR theory, language models, probabilistic retrieval models, feature-based models, learning to rank, combining searches, diversity), Search Engine Architectures and Scalability ( e.g., indexing, compression, MapRedu...

The Information Interaction in Context ( IIiX ) conference will take place in New Brunswick on August 18-22. In the conference’s call for paper, the main topics include: “Interactive information retrieval and interface issues, qualitative approaches to the study of context-sensitive information seeking and information retrieval, context-aware retrieval models, relevance feedback (implicit & explicit) and query modification issues for capturing context, novel approaches to eliciting, identifying, capturing and representing contextual information, task-based interactive information retrieval and information seeking behavior, issues of genre, media, language, modality and structure in contextual information seeking and information retrieval, personalized and collaborative information access in context, contextual information interaction theory, nature of relevance in context, measures and methods for studying and evaluating information seeking and information retrieval in context an...

In an interview with IBNA, entitled “ LIS Studies are Intrinsically Interdisciplinary ”, I talked about the interdisciplinarity, multidisciplinarity, transdisciplinarity, and crossdisciplinarity in LIS research. I believe LIS studies are basically interdisciplinary in terms of their approach, their methodology and their topics. In this interview I explained these three aspects and tried to show how LIS researchers can make use of other subjects’ theoretical frameworks and topics to enrich their studies. I think LIS has its most links with communication studies, management, computer science, psychology, sociology, linguistics, and architecture.

Today is the first day of 2010 and I would take this opportunity to say “Happy New Year!” to all the readers of this weblog and wish them all the best in 2010. This is the seventh year that I am blogging here, though I have lost the archive of my first weblog from 2003 to 2005. Hopefully, in 2010 this weblog will be more informative and I hope to spend more time to keep it up-to-date.