The Invisible Web Weblog

The Journal of Academic Librarianship has published the 4th issue of its 36th volume. Some of the research papers in this publication are: Measuring Referrals: The Use of Paraprofessionals at the Reference Desk, How to Inspire University Librarians to Become “Good Soldiers”? The Role of Job Autonomy, The Readability of Information Literacy Content on Academic Library Web Sites, Can Web 2.0 Enhance Community Participation in an Institutional Repository? Information Illiteracy: Examining our Assumptions, Design and Development of Web-based Information Literacy Tutorials and A study Analyzing the Career Path of Librarians. Moreover in the perspective section they published Library Research on Campus: Examining a Fee-Based Library Service Within University Walls.

6th International Digital Curation Conference (IDCC10) will take place 6 - 8 December 2010, in Chicago. The main theme of this event is “Participation & Practice: Growing the Curation Community through the Data Decade”. According to the conference’s website: “Digital curation manages, maintains, preserves, and adds value to digital data throughout the lifecycle, reducing threats to long-term value, mitigating the risk of digital obsolescence and enhancing usefulness for research and scholarship”. For more information please visit this site .

The third International Conference on Libraries, Information and Society (ICoLIS 2010) will take place in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia in 9 -10 November. The conference’s main theme is: Towards Greater Information Accessibility. For more information about this event, please visit the conference’s website .

Asia-Pacific Conference on Library & Information Education and Practice: Issues, Challenges and Opportunities will take place from 22nd to 24th June 2011 at Pullman Putrajaya Lakeside, Putrajaya, Malaysia. For more information please visit the conference website .

It seems the importance of the "context" as a key factor in understanding different aspects of production, dissemination and usage of information; is being considered in more areas. I recently, read the following paper which describes a new method of citation analysis with a specific attention to the context: Contextual Cocitation: Augmenting Co-citation Analysis and its Applications, written by Alison Callahan, Stephen Hockema and Gunther Eysenbach, published in JSIST, Volume 61 , Issue 6 (June 2010), Pages: 1130-1143.

Journal of Online Information Review (OIR) is going to publish a special issue on evaluating Web search engines. According to the journal's call for paper, "The aim of this special issue is to explore the importance and the many possibilities of evaluating Web search engines ... a web search is clearly the foremost method for finding information today. According to ComScore, more than 130 billion search queries were posed to search engines in a single month in 2009. This explains why search engine research is not only of interest to a community working on improving them, but also to a society whose members rely heavily on search engines. In contrast to the importance of search engines, there are still relatively few studies dealing with their quality. The question is how search engines can be best evaluated considering their wide use and the typical user behaviour towards them. Search engines are not only used for general-purpose queries, but in many different contexts. The sp...

The 15th edition of the International Conference on Information and Documentation Systems (IBERSID 2010) will take place in Zaragoza, Spain, from 4-6 October 2010. The list of papers all available here .

Today afternoon I delivered a presentation in the Department of Information Studies and Interactive Media (INFIM), at the University of Tampere. The title of this presentation is “LIS Students’ Assessments of their own Writing Skills: A Qualitative Case Study”. If you are interested to have more details, please email me to have the slides.

The European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries ( ECDL ) will take place in 6th to 10th of September at the University of Glasgow. The conference main topics include Digital Libraries and Mobility, Digital Library Architectures, Digital Library Infrastructure, Digital Preservation and Curation, Information Mining in Digital Libraries, Information Retrieval in Digital Libraries, Interoperability of Digital Library Systems and Services, Knowledge Organization Systems, Metadata Standards and Protocols in Digital Library Systems, Multilinguality in Digital Libraries, Multimedia Digital Libraries, Personal Information Management and Personal Digital Libraries, Personalisation in Digital Library Systems and Settings, Policies for Digital Library systems, Social Networking, Web 2.0 and Collaborative Interfaces in Digital Libraries, User Interfaces for Digital Libraries, User Studies for and Evaluation of Digital Library Systems and Applications and Visualizat...

I have written a column in Atf Magazine entitled “The Top 20 Pioneer Research Areas in the Current LIS Studies”. To read the column, please follow this link .

I recently published a paper entitled “100 Hints in Thesis Writing” which summarizes the basic principles and advices for people who are writing a master dissertation or a PhD thesis. The paper is a summary of the handout that I have written for the workshops I run on this issue. I also have already delivered a presentation about this in February 2009 . Of course, I know several books have already been published on this issue; however, this paper can be used as a ready reference checklist for students who prefer having a brief guideline. The paper is in Persian. If you like to read it, please send me an email to have a copy of that.