The Invisible Web Weblog

Student Plagiarism in the Online World

2008-05-18T05:50:00.000+01:00

A new book entitle "student plagiarism in an online world: problems and solutions" written by Tim Roberts was published recently and covers interesting topics related to this issue such as: "Alternatives to plagiarism, assessing textual plagiarism, assignments that support original work, blogging and plagiarism, contract cheating, contributing factors to online plagiarism, controlling plagiarism, educating students, information revolution, lecturer attitudes toward plagiarism, plagiarism and international students, plagiarism and the community college, plagiarism as an ethical issue, plagiarism detection systems, plagiarism prevention, plagiarism-related behaviors, student perspective of plagiarism, unintentional plagiarism, writing as a developmental skill". For more information please see this link (http://www.igi-pub.com/downloads/pdf/Roberts_brochure.pdf)

Enjoyment of Reading or Suffer of Writing

2008-05-17T06:27:00.001+01:00

I have to deal with a constant dilemma in my mind to choose between the enjoyment of reading so many valuable books and other stuff or keep writing to survive in the academic world when we have the motto "publish or perish!". What would you do to cope with this difficulty?

Produsage and Produsers

2008-05-11T10:58:00.002+01:00

The increasing growth of the social Web and Web 2.0 has created so many new concepts which are mainly based on the new "User-Led Content Creation" approach. One of these terms is "Produsage" which "...breaks down the boundaries between producers and consumers and instead enables all participants to be users as well as producers of information and knowledge ... produsers engage not in a traditional form of content production, but are instead involved in produsage - the collaborative and continuous building and extending of existing content in pursuit of further improvement." For more information please have a look at this site.

Webometrics: Current Trends and Issues

2008-05-10T04:15:00.001+01:00

In the series of panels in conjunction with TIBF, I also attended a panel on Webometrics to discuss the current issues and trends in this area and its links to the related subjects such as bibliometrics, scientometrics, and Informetrics. At the panel I said the fundamental essence of Webometrics is based on the Web's ability on making link between any parts of it regardless of their distance. We also reviewed the challenges and opportunities in this area. The proceedings of the panel will be published soon.

Panels at TIBF

2008-05-05T12:07:00.002+01:00

Yesterday I was a member of two specialized panels in conjunction with the Tehran International Book Fair. The first one was about screen reading versus reading on paper. We discussed about the current trends of reading on screen and how it affects people reading behavior. The second panel was about mosque libraries and their services. The details of these panels and our discussions will be published soon.

Library Buildings, Collection Development and etc

2008-05-02T09:47:00.002+01:00

These days I have been busy as usual with various LIS related works but these works were somehow different recently. This week I delivered a presentation about the desirable features of library buildings, then contributed to the collection development for my faculty library from Tehran International Book Fair and meanwhile I wrote two book reviews that I was supposed to do ages ago. Luckily, I have done them and should make myself ready for the next week's task including normal teaching, running a workshop and attending a panel at the Tehran International Book Fair.

Non-English Web Retrieval

2008-04-26T06:19:00.000+01:00

Journal of Information Retrieval is going to publish a special Issue on "Non-English Web Retrieval". This issue will focus on evaluation, user search behaviour, query log analysis, indexing, information extraction, summarization, user studies, retrieval models, question answering, natural language processing, concept based image retrieval, creation of multi-lingual web collections, intranet/enterprise search, text categorization and clustering and cross language and multilingual retrieval.

Aggregated Search

2008-04-19T12:28:00.001+01:00

SIGIR 2008 Workshop on Aggregated Search will take place in July 24, Singapore.

21st TIBF

2008-04-13T07:59:00.000+01:00

The 21st Tehran International Book Fair (TIBF) will take place 2 -12 May 2008. For more information please have a look at TIBF website (http://www.tibf.ir/).

Contextualization of Web Searching

2008-04-12T04:23:00.000+01:00

Following my previous works on Web Search Research, this paper was recently published in the Electronic Library:

Mansourian, Y. (2008). Contextualization of web searching: a grounded
theory approach, The Electronic Library, Vol. 26 No. 2 pp. 202-214.

Abstract: Purpose – This paper aims to report selective findings of a wider study on interaction of users with web-based search tools to underline the importance of context in information seeking on the web and to introduce some of the contextual elements of web search context.
Design/methodology/approach – A series of intensive and in-depth interviews was carried out with a sample of the Biology Community at the University of Sheffield. Critical Incident Technique (CIT) was employed in the interview protocol and the collected data was inductively analyzed in the light of Grounded Theory approach.
Findings – The results strongly suggest that considering the context of search is a pivotal factor in understanding users' behaviours, feelings, and thoughts during the period of information seeking in an online environment. Five categories have been identified as the main contextual elements which affect search performance of end users. These categories include web users' characteristics; type of the employed search tool; search topic; search situation; and features of the retrieved information resources. Each category has its subcategories which have been illustrated in the paper.
Research limitations/implications – This study was carried out based on a relatively small sample of academia and therefore the results cannot be easily generalized to the wide community of web users. The results of this study should be able to make information literacy education more effective by using information seeking behaviour research discoveries. This study demonstrated that the outcome of any information literacy courses would be more efficient if the contextual factors – which have been identified and illuminated in this study – were considered in the educational agenda.
Originality/value – The study possesses three characteristics that make it different from other studies in the related areas. First of all, it took an in-depth insight to the interaction of end users with the web in real situations. Secondly it focused on a specific targeted group, the academic biology community. Thirdly the study adopted a qualitative approach, in contrast with mainly quantitative web research.

Keywords: Information literacy, Information searches, Qualitative research, Search engines, User interfaces, Worldwide web

Article Type: Research paper, DOI: 10.1108/02640470810864091
Article URL: http://www.emeraldinsight.com/10.1108/02640470810864091

e-Society 2008

2008-04-07T13:53:00.000+01:00

IADIS International Conference of e-Society 2008 takes place in Algarve, Portugal from 9-12 April 2008. For more details please see the conference website (www.esociety-conf.org/).

Semantic Search: Search for Meaning

2008-04-03T07:58:00.002+01:00

The latest progress in web-based search industry is always one of my favourite areas of study. If you look through the related literature you can see various techniques claiming better search results. However, I think what we really need is new search engines which are able to make sense of what we ask them. This approach is called differently in various sources such as "Search 2.0" or "Semantic Search". Hakia compares this approach with the traditional indexing methods and concludes that: "Semantic search technology has many advantages compared to statistical (popularity) methods, especially when statistical data is not available such as in dynamic content and long-tail queries". I don't know how successful they have been in implementation of this new approach but for more information please have a look at this address.

JoDI Special Issue

2008-04-01T09:15:00.001+01:00

Special Issue of the Journal of Digital Information will focus on "Digital Libraries and User-Generated Content". The special issue aims to "explore how digital libraries can leverage on the various technologies underlying user-generated content to provide innovative and useful services for their users. Since such technologies are potentially disruptive, the special issue will also investigate how support for user-generated content would impact digital libraries, their administrators, users and other stakeholders". Topics of interest include "Use of Web 2.0 technologies in digital libraries, mobile services in digital libraries, supporting digital library infrastructure and architecture, information retrieval and mining techniques, virtual worlds and digital libraries, user communities, usability and user needs, novel interfaces supporting user-generated content and social, institutional and policy issues."

4th WIS

2008-04-01T08:56:00.001+01:00

Fourth International Conference on Webometrics, Informetrics and Scientometrics (WIS) and Ninth COLLNET Meeting will take place 29 July – 1 August, 2008 at the Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin, Institute of Library and Information Science in Berlin. To see more details please visit the COLLNET website.

JMLA

2008-03-30T11:34:00.002+01:00

If you look for an accredited open access journal in the area of medical informatics then JMLA (Journal of the Medical Library Association) might be a good source for you. The journal covers a wide variety of topics in LIS including information literacy. For example, "Integrating information literacy into the education of public health professionals: roles for librarians and the library" written by Laura Cobus is an example of papers on information literacy in the current issue of the journal (January 2008).

DoIS

2008-03-30T11:11:00.001+01:00

DoIS (Documents in Information Science) is a useful service for searching and downloading research results in Information Science. In fact, DoIS is a web-based database of articles and conference proceedings published in electronic format in the area of LIS.

ISKO 10

2008-03-26T09:00:00.003Z

The International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO) will hold its 10th International ISKO Conference in Montréal, Canada, August 5th-8th 2008. The Conference theme is culture and identity in knowledge organization. The proposed research topics for this edition include: epistemological foundations in KO, models and methods, systems and tools, ethics, KO for libraries, archives, and museums, non-textual materials, KO in multilingual environments, users and social context.

Happy Nowrouz

2008-03-18T07:58:00.002Z

Nowrouz is the beginning of the new Iranian year in 21th of March every year. I say Happy New Year to everyone and wish you the best for the coming year. Today is the last working day of this year for most people and we have a few days off. I was very busy during this year but thankfully pretty successful at the end. I was mainly involved in teaching and teaching-related activities at the university.

E-journals Standards

2008-03-15T09:26:00.000Z

Recently I was the referee for a promotion presentation at a research centre which was about developments of standards for e-journals. Regarding the increasing number of e-journals and the current diversity in their formats I also think this is the time to think about the development of widely accepted standards to facilitate the publication and usage of these resources.

The Science of the Web

2008-03-15T09:22:00.001Z

The "Science of the Web" is a new interdisciplinary area of research and practice which is going to investigate how the WWW affects various aspects of our life and how we should react to the web-based developments. The website of The Web Science Research Initiative (WSRI) introduces it as "... to facilitate and produce the fundamental scientific advances necessary to inform the future design and use of the World Wide Web."

Children and Libraries

2008-03-10T12:04:00.003Z

In this semester I teach a variety of modules including "Library Services for Children" which is an interesting topic to learn more about it. In this module I try to talk about various criteria to develop library collections for children and how to choose the most appropriate materials for them. Also we discuss on specific services that a library can offer to enhance children's reading skills and provide them with facilities to make them interested to libraries. I also try to introduce various online resources that can be helpful in this issue. For instance, International Children’s Digital Library and the Association for Library Service to Children. (ALSC)

Digital Preparedness and E-readiness

2008-03-10T06:07:00.002Z

Everyday we come across new concepts which emerge as a result of current advances and developments in ICT world. For example, Digital Preparedness is a quite new measure to show how prepare a society is to employ digital facilities in various aspects of life. Likewise, e-readiness is another concept which is somehow similar and in someway different with Digital Preparedness, but to serve the same purpose. Nevertheless, these concepts are in macro level and to calculate them we need to identify and evaluate other measurable features such as Digital Opportunity Index (DOI) and Networked Readiness Index (NRI). The inherent difficulty of assessing these concepts comes to the difficulty of measuring the cultural and social context of each society which inevitably affects them.

Interview with IBNA

2008-03-09T10:52:00.003Z

A reporter from IBNA (Iran Book News Agency) has recently done an interview with me about the social role of public libraries and how these libraries can contribute in providing various information services for its users. We also talked about LIS education and how we should keep our LIS curriculum abreast with the current advances in ICT. The interview's transcript is available on IBNA interviews section.

Impact of ICT on Educational and Research Performance

2008-03-03T06:11:00.001Z

Recently I was the internal examiner for a master dissertation in educational technology about the impact of access to and use of ICT facilities on universities' educational and research performance. The result just was a confirmation of the previous studies that there is a direct and significant link between these factors. It was the forth dissertation that I assessed during this academic year.

ILISA General Assembly

2008-03-03T06:00:00.003Z

Two days ago(1st of March) I attended the ILISA Annual Meeting at the National Library's main conference hall. It was our annual General Assembly to report the ILISA's various activities during the last year. We also had some well-known speakers at the meeting, recently retired LIS lecturers and a panel of Iranian LIS eminent professors. Moreover, it was a wonderful opportunity to meet old friends and colleagues as many people from different parts of the country had come along.