The Invisible Web Weblog

This is 21 of March again and another New Iranian Year begins. I wish you all a wonderful year full of happiness and success. Happy Nowrouz and Happy New Year!

Evidence Based Library and Information Practice has just published its latest issue at here .

I have recently published a paper about my idea of " Reading Octagon ". I am looking forward to hearing your comments about it.

This week I have been involved in several thesis related activities. Today I was the external examiner for a master dissertation about self archiving patterns of highly productive scholars in science and social science areas. Also, today I accepted to be the adviser of a PhD thesis on the cognitive aspects of scholars’ information seeking behaviors. Moreover, yesterday one of my students passed his viva and his dissertation was about evaluation of an e-learning system in the field of entrepreneurship management. Furthermore, in this week I became the adviser of another PhD study about semantic networks of core concepts in Hafiz poets with an ontological view on this issue. Finally, during this week, I had a workshop on thesis writing skills!

International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries ( TPDL ) will take place September 26-28, 2011 in Berlin. TPDL 2011 is organized by the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin (Berlin School of Library and Information Science, the Computer and Media Services and the Department of Computer Science). The conference main themes include: Foundations: Technology and Methodologies • Digital libraries: architectures and infrastructures • Metadata standards and protocols in digital library systems • Interoperability in digital libraries, data and information integration • Distributed and collaborative information spaces • Systems, algorithms, and models for digital preservation • Personalization in digital libraries • Information access: retrieval and browsing • Information organization • Information visualization • Multimedia information management and retrieval • Multilinguality in digital libraries • Knowledge organization and ontologies in digital libraries Digital Humanities •...

There is a call for chapters by Emerald Library and Information Science Book Series for a book on Web Search Engine Research. The editor is Professor Dirk Lewandowski and the topics include: * Retrieval effectiveness * User satisfaction * Evaluation of search engine interfaces * Search engines? index quality * The impact of search on society * Reliability of search results * Query log analysis * User guidance in the search process * Index and/or results freshness, diversity of results * Influence of search engine optimization (SEO) on results quality. More information is available here .

The highest form of pure thought is in mathematics. Plato Do not worry about your difficulties in mathematics. I can assure you that mine are still greater. Albert Einstein Pure mathematics is, in its way, the poetry of logical ideas. Albert Einstein The essence of mathematics is not to make simple things complicated, but to make complicated things simple. Stan Gudder Mathematics, rightly viewed, posses not only truth, but supreme beauty; a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture. Bertrand Russell Film is one of the three universal languages, the other two: mathematics and music. In mathematics the art of asking questions is more valuable than solving problems.

The recent issue of the International Journal of Information Management, includes the following research papers: On the motivating impact of price and online recommendations at the point of online purchase, The cognitive selection framework for knowledge acquisition strategies in virtual communities, Knowledge management and communication in Brazilian agricultural research: An integrated procedural approach, The intellectual development of the technology acceptance model: A co-citation analysis, The scope of external information-seeking under uncertainty: An individual-level study Information and communication technologies (ICTs) and farmers’ decision-making across the agricultural supply chain, Understanding the dynamics of users’ belief in software application adoption, Enterprise Information Portals in support of business process, design teams and collaborative commerce performance.

Colloquium on the Comparative Epistemology of Information & Communication in scientific disciplines will take place 8 April 2011 at the University of Lyon 3. In the conference’s aims and objectives it is mentioned that: “ ... Although no consensus exists on a common definition of the concepts of information and communication, few can reject the hypothesis that information – whether perceived as «object» or as «process» is a pre-condition for knowledge. Epistemology is the study of how we know things or the study of how scientific knowledge is arrived at and validated. To adopt an epistemological stance is to commit one to render an account of what constitutes knowledge or in procedural terms, to render an account of when one can claim to know something. An epistemological theory imposes constraints on the interpretation of human cognitive interaction with the world. It goes without saying that different epistemological theories will have more or less restrictive criteria to disting...

Recently I have been involved in a case study on research methods of children literature. On the other hand, I am adviser of a doctoral thesis on the concept of elderly in the Persian literature. My role in these studies is advising the researchers about the qualitative content analysis. So, though my knowledge about these areas is limited, I can contribute to these studies in terms of the methodological aspects. This is a wonderful paradoxical situation for me and I enjoy learning from people in such a different areas. Thanks to the qualitative research that provides me with such amazing opportunities for learning and getting involved in various interdisciplinary projects.

The international conference of Information Science and Social Media (ISSOME) will take place August 24-26, by the Department of Information Studies at Åbo Akademi University. Topics of interest include: * Social media in information science * Information aspects of social media * Library 2.0 and Librarian 2.0 * Social networking sites * Information Management * Knowledge Management * Knowledge Organization * Reputation Management * Information Behaviour and Information Use * Information dissemination in social media

I have written an article entitled “Personal and Social Digital Heritage: From Creation to Conservation” which has been published here .

The Special Interest Group on International Information Issues (SIG-III) of the American Society for Information Science & Technology (ASIS&T) announced its eleventh competition for papers to be submitted for the 2011 Annual Meeting. Topics include the following 7 core areas: 1. Intercultural Information Ethics: Critical reflection on the ethical challenges related to the global and cross-cultural production, storage, and distribution of information, as well as the ethical dimensions of the global development and implementation of information systems, infrastructures, and policies. 2. Information Behaviour: Information needs, information seeking, information gaps and sense-making in various contexts including work, interests or every-day life activities by individuals or groups. 3. Knowledge Organization: Indexing, index construction, indexing languages, thesaurus construction, terminology, classification of information in any form, tagging (expert, user-based, automatic), filt...

Reference Services Review (RSR) is going to publish a special issue on learning landscapes and the new reality. Learning landscapes encompass the physical and virtual spaces where today’s library users encounter information and learn to use it effectively. Papers might focus on the following topics: The interplay of physical and virtual learning landscapes and what this means for teaching, reference, collaboration, and management – new learners, new faculty, and new roles; The impact of library/information commons’ spaces on learning, service design and delivery, collections, and library administration – planning, implementation, assessment, re-examination and evolution; Research on user expectations, needs and perceptions as next generation users interact with next generation information environments – what do library staff need to know to meet their needs? Other aspects of learning, working and researching at the intersection of place and placelessness where libraries exist in the di...

The Iranian Library and Information Science Association (ILISA) organized a workshop entitled “Methods, Approaches, and Criteria of Refereeing Scientific Papers”. The workshop took place yesterday (19 January) at the National Library, and Dr. Fattahi and I were the speakers. About 40 people from various disciplines, mainly LIS, attended the workshop. Over the last 9 years, ILISA and its provincial branches have held about 200 workshops on various topics around the country. However, this one was the first on this specific issue. The participants were either academic journal referees, members of editorial boards, academic staff, librarians or just readers who were interested to learn more about the refereeing process. In this event, we talked about the necessity and the main objectives of peer review, different approaches and methods in peer review, the desirable qualifications of good referees, and also the possible challenges and pitfalls in peer review. We also analysed a sample of ...

In a brief note in LISNA I explained the various types of unusual citation behaviors. The full text of this note is available here .

Today, in an interview with IBNA, I talked about the differences between popularity and prestige in citation analysis studies. Popular papers receive many citations, regardless where they were published. While prestigious papers are published in highly recognized journals, even if they do not get as many citations as the popular ones. Of course, a paper might be both popular and prestigious at the same time. I also talked about how we can make use of citation analysis research in practical fields like collection developments in libraries, and for ranking journals and scholars in various subjects. The full transcription of this interview is available here .

Today I had a workshop at the main library of our university about Current Awareness Services (CAS) and Selective Dissemination of Information (SDI) in academic libraries. In this workshop I tried to introduce a number of simple and practical steps that we can employ in our libraries to develop these services and provide our users with more relevant and pertinent information resources. I believe librarians should not necessarily wait for the advanced and perfect infrastructure facilities to develop these services. In contrary, we can put these services into operation through a number of creative and simple steps. As a result we will be able to make a positive difference in the level and usefulness of what we do.

Library & Information Science Research has published the first issue of its 33th volume. The titles of some papers in this issue are: Collaboration in information and library science doctoral education, Gracious space: Library programming strategies towards immigrants as tools in the creation of social capital, Trends in information behavior research, 1999–2008: A content analysis, “I did not realize so many options are available”: Cognitive authority, emerging adults, and e-mental health, Information behaviors of Latinos attending high school in East Los Angeles, Neighborhood disparities in access to information resources: Measuring and mapping U.S. public libraries’ funding and service landscapes, Evaluation of strategic plans in academic medical libraries, Users' perceptions of university library websites: A unifying view, Asking and sharing information in the blogosphere: The case of slimming blogs, Towards an understanding of the use of an institutional repository with int...

The 14th International Conference on Business Information Systems (BIS 2011) will take place in Poznan, Poland, June 15-17, 2011. The conference theme is: Towards Flexible, Personalized and Adaptive Business Applications. The topics include the following issues: Business Process Management - Semantic business process management - Adaptive and dynamic processes - Supply chain processes - ERP implementations - Integration of data and processes - Collaborative BPM Ontologies - Creation, learning, population, evolution and evaluation - Ontologies for enterprise content management - Natural language processing and cognitive science - Semantic integration of heterogeneous semi-structured sources - Interoperability of heterogeneous information systems - Business models for Web information integration Contexts - Location-aware and geography-centric information systems - Wireless and mobile applications - Multi-agent distributed systems - Semantic web personaliza...

The first issue of Information Processing & Management (IMP) is available online now and includes 146 pages. The title of research articles in this issue are: Enhancing query translation with relevance feedback in translingual information retrieval, Modeling information sources as integrals for effective and efficient source selection, Select-the-Best-Ones: A new way to judge relative relevance, Mining and modeling linkage information from citation context for improving biomedical literature retrieval, Medical query generation by term–category correlation, Popular and/or prestigious? Measures of scholarly esteem, Measuring the interestingness of articles in a limited user environment, The skewness of computer science, Discovering author impact: A PageRank perspective, Patterns of bibliographic references in the ACM published papers.

Today is the first day of year 2011 and this is my first post on my weblog in this year. I take this opportunity to wish you all a wonderful year, full of health and happiness. Happy New Year with the best wishes!