The Invisible Web Weblog

Seventh International Conference on Conceptions of Library and Information Science ( CoLIS ) was recently held at University College London. This events’ main theme was "Integration in the Information Sciences: Unity in Diversity" and the sub-themes included: theoretical and conceptual approaches to the study of the communication of information, including fundamental theory, methodological approaches, and new research agendas; convergence of theory and practice in the information disciplines, including the future of these disciplines, and their relation to practice in areas other than librarianship and information management; memory practices in physical and digital environments, including information collecting and organising practices, relation to information and document management; studies on participatory information and communication environments, including social media, participatory archives and digital libraries, and new information design practices and also educatio...

Journal of “Online Information Review” is going to publish a special issue on “Evaluating Web Search Engines”. The topics include: retrieval effectiveness, reliability of search results, language handling, index sizes and overlap comparisons, query log analysis, user behaviour, results presentation, user surveys, user guidance in the search process, ability of search engines to deal with different query types, index and/or results freshness, diversity of results, search features comparison, influence of search engine optimization (SEO) on results quality.

The "Library Assessment Conference: Building Effective, Sustainable, Practical Assessment" will take place in Baltimore, Maryland, from 25 to 27 October, 2010. According the conference’s website , its goal is: “ ... to support and nurture the library assessment community through a mix of invited speakers, contributed papers and posters, workshops, and engaging discussion.” They will cover the following areas: Digital libraries, information resources and collections, learning and teaching, management information, methods and tools, organizational issues, performance measurement and measures, return on investment (ROI), services, space planning and utilization, usability, usage and e-metrics, user needs, value and impact.

CLEF 2010: Conference on Multilingual and Multimodal Information Access Evaluation will be held from 20 to 23 September, in Padua. This event is an examples of research activities on Cross-Language Information Retrieval (CLIR) studies. According to their call for paper , the relevant topics for the conference include: novel methodologies for the design of evaluation tasks, especially user-centric ones; alternative methods for improving and automating ground-truth creation; task-oriented and easy to communicate metrics; innovative techniques for analyzing the experimental results, including statistical analysis, data mining, and information visualization; infrastructures for bringing automation and collaboration in the evaluation process; component-based evaluation approaches; analysis of the impact of multilingual/multicultural/multimodal differences on interface and search design; multilinguality and multimodality in relevant application communities – e.g. digital libraries, intellec...

SIGIR Workshop on the Automated Evaluation of Interactive Information Retrieval will take place on July 23, at SIGIR to address themes such as: definitions of automated evaluation, methods and methodologies for automated evaluation, the ideal simulation (akin to the ideal test collection), types of experiments that can be performed, control and limitations of the different approaches, simulating queries, judgments, clicks, etc., user modelling and estimating models of interaction and research agenda with a road map of future challenges. According to their website , Interactive IR may be classified into four classes: (1) observing real users in real situations (real users, no simulation), (2) observing recruited users performing assigned tasks (real users/interactions, simulated tasks ), (3) performing simulations in the lab without users (simulation of interaction; no users), and, (4) traditional lab based (simulated) experiments (i.e. no users (or abstracted users), fixed interaction ...

The ELAG (European Library Automation Group) Conference discusses library and information management technology. Topics of the past conferences have included digital libraries, library portals, institutional repositories, web services, digital preservation and open source software. ELAG 2010 takes place in Helsinki with the main theme of “Meeting New User Expectations”. The sub-themes include: knowing our users, open linked data and library data re use, tweaking search results relevance ranking, fulfilment strategies, what’s in those libraries and how do I get to it, lending E-books, e-memory and discovery interfaces.

The fifth International Conference on Digital Information Management ( ICDIM 2010 ) will take place from 5th to 8th July 2010, in Thunder Bay, Canada. The conference’s topics include: Temporal and Spatial Databases, Data Mining, Web Mining including Web Intelligence and Web 3.0, E-Learning, eCommerce, e-Business and e-Government, Web Metrics and its applications, XML and other extensible languages, Semantic Web, Ontologies and Rules, Human-Computer Interaction, Artificial Intelligence and Decision Support Systems, Knowledge Management, Ubiquitous Systems, Peer to Peer Data Management, Interoperability, Mobile Data Management, Data Models for Production Systems and Services, Data Exchange issues and Supply Chain, Data Life Cycle in Products and Processes, Case Studies on Data Management, Monitoring and Analysis, Security and Access Control, Information Content Security, Mobile, Ad Hoc and Sensor Network Security, Distributed information systems, Information Visualization, Web services, ...

The Eleventh International Society for Music Information Retrieval Conference ( ISMIR 2010 ) will be held in Utrecht, Netherlands, from 9th to 13th August. Some of the conference topics include: music perception and cognition, musical knowledge and meaning, content-based querying and retrieval, automatic classification, music recommendation and play list generation, fingerprinting and digital rights management, transcription and annotation, music summarisation, music structure analysis, optical music recognition, music signal processing, libraries, archives and digital collections, database systems, indexing and query languages, text and web mining, evaluation of MIR systems, knowledge representation, social tags, and metadata, user interfaces and user models, and methodological issues and philosophical foundations.

The Fourth International Plagiarism Conference will take place between 21 and 23 June, 2010 at Northumbria University, Newcastle upon Tyne, UK. The conference’s themes include: creating a culture of honesty, ensuring authenticity in non text-based disciplines and multimedia, addressing non-traditional learning styles, ensuring the integrity of research and published work, innovative assessment techniques beyond the essay, the changing nature of authorship in a Web 2.0 world, contract cheating, plagiarism detection, etc.