The Invisible Web Weblog

The paper "Evaluating Advanced Search Interfaces Using Established Information-seeking Models" written by Max L. Wilson, M.C. Schraefel, and Ryen W. White, and published in the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. Vol. 60, No. 7, July 2009, pp. 1407-1422, won the Best JASIST Paper Award in 2010.

Journal of Information Processing & Management (IPM) published an especial issue on “Collaborative Information Seeking”. The titles of some of the papers in this issue are as follows: Social and interactional practices for disseminating current awareness information in an organisational setting; Breakdowns in collaborative information seeking: A study of the medication process; An elaborated model of social search; Do your friends make you smarter?: An analysis of social strategies in online information seeking; Microcollaborations in a social Q&A community; Search on surfaces: Exploring the potential of interactive tabletops for collaborative search tasks; Evaluating collaborative information-seeking interfaces with a search-oriented inspection method and re-framed information seeking theory; An asynchronous collaborative search system for online video search; CIRLab: A groupware framework for collaborative information retrieval research; Division of labour and sharing of know

Today morning I had a half-day workshop for a group of librarians and archivists in Tehran about the basic skills that a reference librarian should possess to carry out successful reference interviews and deliver effective services to library users. In particular, I focused on essential techniques such as active listening, paraphrasing, clarification and confirmation that are very useful to supervise reference interviews.

Yesterday I wrote a column in IBNA entitled “Measures and Criteria in Evaluation of Academic Resources”. The full text of this post is available here .

The Journal of Academic Librarianship has published the fifth issue of its 36th volume. The titles of some of the papers appeared in this issue are as follows: The Impact of the Economic Downturn on Libraries: with Special Reference to University Libraries, The Current State of Middle Management Preparation, Training, and Development in Academic Libraries, Half Empty or Half Full? Staffing Trends in Academic Libraries at U.S. Research Universities, 2000–2008, “It Makes History Alive for them”: the Role of Archivists and Special Collections Librarians in Instructing Undergraduates, Using Pedestrian Choice Research to Facilitate Resource Engagement in a Midsized Academic Library, History of an Indian Library and Challenges for Today, Promoting Professionalism in Master's Level Teachers through Research Based Writing.

The sixth International Evidence Based Library and Information Practice Conference (EBLIP6): Valuing Knowledge and Expertise will be held at the University of Salford, Greater Manchester, UK from 27th-30th June 2011. Key themes include, but are not restricted to: Evidence Based Practice: Reflection * Reflective practice and its relationship to EBLIP * Reflection on EBLIP * Questioning and adapting the EBP model for the specific needs of EBLIP Evidence Based Practice: Impact and Value * Methods of demonstrating impact and value within an evidence based context * The use of EBLIP to demonstrate value or impact * Practising EBLIP in times of financial uncertainty * Maximising the value of the individual case study in library research * Outcome indicators: what must we measure, what should we measure and what could we measure Evidence Based Practice: Practicality and Applicability? * The practicality of using the EBLIP model * Is EBLIP applicable in your setting * Practical methods for EBL

Two LIS master students, that I was their supervisor, passed their viva during this week. The topic of their research was on evaluation the different aspects of library websites and the titles of their dissertations were as follows: 1. Evaluation of Children and Teens’ Library Websites and Purposing Guidelines for Designing Suitable User Interface, 2. A Content Analysis of the Frequently Asked Questions (FAQs) in the National, Academic and Public Libraries’ Websites.

International Journal of Information Management has published the 5th issue of its 30th volume. Some of the papers in this issue are as follows: Web-based interaction: A review of three important human factors; Understanding users’ behaviours regarding supply chain technology; The role of the quality of shared information in inter-organizational systems use; What makes bloggers share knowledge? An investigation on the role of trust; Knowledge management: An information science perspective; Exploring the role of psychological safety in promoting the intention to continue sharing knowledge in virtual communities; Innovation and knowledge sharing across professional boundaries; A techno-cultural emergence perspective on the management of techno-change and Psychological traits and loyalty intentions towards e-Government services. This is the journal’s homepage .

Journal of Informetrics has published the fourth issue of its fourth volume. The titles of some research papers appeared in this issue are: The development of an AI journal ranking based on the revealed preference approach; Growth behavior of publications and patents: A comparative study on selected Asian economies; Word co-occurrences on Webpages as a measure of the relatedness of organizations: A new Webometrics concept; Can information ethics be conceptualized by using the core/periphery model? Publication point indicators: A comparative case study of two publication point systems and citation impact in an interdisciplinary context; The effect of scholar collaboration on impact and quality of academic papers; Ranking of library and information science researchers: Comparison of data sources for correlating citation data; and expert judgments; A relational database for bibliometric analysis; A research impact indicator for institutions and Geographic characteristics of the growth o

The 8th "International Conference on Information Technology: New Generations" will take place in April 11-13, 2011, in Las Vegas, Nevada. The conference’s main themes are: 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.