The Invisible Web Weblog

Happy New Year

2011-03-21T16:21:00.000+03:30

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!

EBLIP New Issue

2011-03-18T19:40:00.002+03:30

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

Reading Octagon

2011-03-18T13:06:00.001+03:30

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

Surrounded by Theses and Dissertations!

2011-02-09T20:56:00.001+03:30

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!

TPDL 2011

2011-02-07T08:17:00.001+03:30

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

• Digital libraries in cultural heritage
• Computational linguistics: text mining and retrieval
• Organizational aspects of digital preservation
• Information policy and legal aspects (e.g., copyright laws)
• Social networks and networked information
• Human factors in networked information
• Scholarly primitives

Research Data

• Architectures for large-scale data management (e.g., Grids, Clouds)
• Cyberinfrastructures: architectures, operation and evolution
• Collaborative information environments
• Data mining and extraction of structure from networked information
• Scientific data curation
• Metadata for scientific data, data provenance
• Services and workflows for scientific data
• Data and knowledge management in virtual organizations

Applications and User Experience

• Multi-national digital library federations (e.g., Europeana)
• Digital Libraries in eGovernment, elearning, eHealth, eScience, ePublishing
• Semantic Web and Linked Data
• User studies for and evaluation of digital library systems and applications
• Personal information management and personal digital libraries
• Enterprise-scale knowledge and information management
• User behaviour and modelling
• User mobility and context awareness in information access
• User interfaces for digital libraries

Web Search Engine Research

2011-02-07T08:04:00.001+03:30

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.

Mathematics Quotes

2011-02-07T07:49:00.001+03:30

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.

International Journal of Information Management

2011-02-07T07:42:00.001+03:30

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 EPICIC

2011-01-30T21:46:00.001+03:30

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 distinguish what constitutes knowledge from what is not.”

Research on Life Span

2011-01-30T21:27:00.002+03:30

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.

ISSOME 2011

2011-01-30T21:19:00.001+03:30

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

Personal and Social Digital Legacy

2011-01-27T13:07:00.001+03:30

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

International Paper Contest

2011-01-26T07:39:00.002+03:30

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), filtering, metadata, standards for metadata, information architecture.

4. Information Systems, Interactivity and Design: How people use and communicate with information systems; the design, use and evaluation of interactive information technologies and systems, including interfaces and algorithms; search and retrieval, browsing, visualization, personalization.

5. Information and Knowledge Management: Information and knowledge creation, transfer and use at the personal, group, organizational and societal levels. The management of the processes and systems that create, acquire, organize, store, distribute, and use information and/or knowledge.

6. Information Use: How people re-purpose existing knowledge from a variety of sources (scientific, humanities, news, family, friends, colleagues), forms (articles, books, video, audio, tweets), locations (work, home, in transit) and mediums (cell-phones, PDAs, digital libraries) to advance knowledge, solve problems, improve information literacy, and learn.

7. Information and Society: Economic, Political, Social Issues: Copyright issues, policies and laws; national and international information policies; privacy and security; economics of information, personal rights vs. freedom of information; surveillance; globalization and the flows of information; computerization movements; social informatics.

Learning Landscapes and New Reality

2011-01-22T20:26:00.001+03:30

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 digital age.

ILISA Workshop on Peer Review

2011-01-19T08:35:00.004+03:30

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 referees’ comments on some real papers to provide the participants with a number of authentic examples. At the end, we asked the participants to critically analyse a sample paper and share their ideas about it with each other. In general, I think it was a very successful session as we enjoyed of profound discussions with the participants on various aspects of the peer review process. A more detailed report of this workshop is available at LISNA website.

Too Many or Few Citations!

2011-01-17T10:29:00.003+03:30

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

Popular and Prestigious Publications

2011-01-16T22:05:00.005+03:30

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.

CAS and SDI in Libraries

2011-01-15T19:23:00.002+03:30

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

2011-01-14T20:35:00.004+03:30

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 integrated social networking tools: A case study of PocketKnowledge.

Business Information Systems

2011-01-06T14:02:00.004+03:30

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 personalization
- Ambient computing

Content Retrieval and Filtering
- Hidden Web search and crawling
- Data integration from Web information sources
- Modeling and describing evolving data sources
- Adaptive integration of evolving data sources
- Information gathering for knowledge-intensive enterprises
- Search over semi-structural Web sources
- Business models for a content

Collaboration
- Knowledge-based collaboration
- Social networks and social wikis
- Enterprise mashups, Enterprise 2.0
- Infrastructures for collaboration
- Semantic grid
- Security in distributed systems
- Web-based model for discoverability, consumption, reuse

Web Services
- Service oriented computing (SOA)
- Semantic web services
- Composition, choreography and orchestration
- Open, decentralized self-service
- Trust and quality of service (QoS)
- Service level agreements

IPM in 2011

2011-01-05T21:15:00.003+03:30

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.

Hello 2011

2011-01-01T20:20:00.001+03:30

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!

A Quick Look at 2010

2010-12-27T22:07:00.004+03:30

This is probably the last post that I am writing in 2010. Perhaps, it would be a good time to take a quick look at what I have done during this year in my academic life. Thankfully, it was a fairly successful year for me and I managed to achieve some of my academic and research goals, though I still have a very long list of unfinished works! I think like many others I suffer from some sorts of academic procrastination and need to enhance my time management skills! But, luckily, the overall result is not too bad. As in addition to my usual works at the university including my teaching duties as a lecturer, and my administration jobs as the head of our small department, I completed some other tasks too. For example, I eventually completed my book entitled “Basics of Academic Writing” which was in my ‘to do list’ for more than two years. Moreover, I wrote a number of Persian and English papers including research articles, viewpoints, book reviews and brief notes. I also had several workshops on various subjects mainly on Academic Writing, Thesis Writing, Qualitative Research, Information Literacy, and Decision Making Skills in Research. Furthermore, I was member of some scientific committees in a number of national and international conferences and delivered a few speeches in some other academic and professional meetings. Reviewing journal papers is another task that I usually do, and I spent quite a long time in 2010 to review papers and research reports. Besides, I was the supervisor for three master dissertations and external examiner for a number of other thesis and dissertations. In the summer 2010 I visited the Department of Information Studies and Interactive Media at Tampere University, which was a very fruitful visit. Last but not least, I uploaded 140 posts on this weblog during year 2010. It means in average I updated my weblog twice a week, which is hopefully good enough! See you in 2011!

Library Hi Tech

2010-12-27T22:04:00.001+03:30

Library Hi Tech published a special issue on "Best Young Professionals 2", and the following papers appeared in this issue.

Artificially intelligent conversational agents in libraries,

Alleviating physical space constraints using virtual space?: A study from an urban academic library,

Utilizing geographic information systems (GIS) in library research,

Information literacy barriers: language use and social structure,

Making web content accessible for the deaf via sign language,

Overcoming the information gap: Measuring the accessibility of library databases to adaptive technology users,

Preserving authenticity in the digital age,

Making the case for the leadership role of school librarians in technology integration,

A Six Sigma-based method to renovate information services: Focusing on information acquisition process,

OCLC's WorldCat Local versus III's WebPAC: Which interface is better at supporting common user tasks?

Evaluating and comparing discovery tools: how close are we towards next generation catalogue?

Archiving in the networked world: LOCKSS and national hosting.

The International Information & Library Review

2010-12-26T14:01:00.000+03:30

The following papers were appeared in the latest issue of The International Information & Library Review:

International scholarly collaboration in science, technology and medicine and social science of Turkish scientists,

Gender differences in information seeking behaviour in three universities in West Bengal, India,

Mapping mixed methods research in library and information science journals in Sub-Saharan Africa 2004–2008,

Surveying scholars’ perceptions of electronic environments: A case study of university libraries in Kerala (India),

Scholarly journal use and reading behaviour of social scientists in Taiwan.

Decision Making Skills

2010-12-26T13:50:00.001+03:30

Yesterday I had a workshop at the National Library about "Decision Making Skills in the Research Process". If you would like to see the workshop’s PowerPoint file, please email me.

Journal of Informetrics

2010-12-26T13:33:00.002+03:30

The first issue of the Journal of Informetrics in 2011 was published. These are some of the research papers in this issue:

PrestigeRank: A new evaluation method for papers and journals,

Approaches to understanding and measuring interdisciplinary scientific research(IDR): A review of the literature,

On the definition of forward and backward citation generations,

Towards a new crown indicator: Some theoretical considerations,

The measurement of low- and high-impact in citation distributions,

Structured evaluation of the scientific output of academic research groups by recent h-based indicators,

Bibliometric rankings of journals based on Impact Factors: An axiomatic approach,

Indicators of the interdisciplinarity of journals: Diversity, centrality, and citations,

The effects and their stability of field normalization baseline on relative performance with respect to citation impact: A case study of 20 natural science departments,

How and where the TeraGrid supercomputing infrastructure benefits science,

High- and low-impact citation measures: Empirical applications,

An approach for detecting, quantifying, and visualizing the evolution of a research field: A practical application to the Fuzzy Sets Theory field,

Gender differences in peer reviews of grant applications: A substantive-methodological synergy in support of the null hypothesis model,

A proposal for a First-Citation-Speed-Index,

Scientific collaboration and endorsement: Network analysis of co-authorship and citation networks,

Are researchers that collaborate more at the international level top performers? An investigation on the Italian university system.

Reading and Writing Practice

2010-12-24T12:47:00.002+03:30

This week I had two workshops for two different groups of students about academic writing. At the end of these workshops I asked them to do the following practices to enhance their writing skills.

1. Bibliographic Practice: Make a list of 10 well known textbooks in your subject, with their full bibliographic information. Please make sure to include the latest versions of these books in your list. Then have a look at their table of contents and compare their contents and structures.

2. Paraphrasing: Read a recent well cited or hot paper in your subject and write a few paragraphs, or preferably 2 or 3 pages, about it in your own language. Please use simple words and write simple and short sentences.

3. Browsing: Go to the library and browse the recent issues of the main journals in your area of study. Read the paper titles and have a quick look at abstracts. Alternatively, you can browse their websites. In this stage you do not need to read the thoroughly.

4. Free Writing: Select a topic and write about it in 10 to 15 minutes. It can be about anything that you may like. Do not worry about spelling and grammar while you are writing. Just keep writing for 10 to 15 minutes without any uncertainty and hesitation. Then leave it for a day and come back to it later on. Then edit and expand it several times. You will be amazed how much you will have to say.

5. Purposeful Reading: Select a recent paper written by a successful author in your area of study. Then read it while trying to inspire by the style of writing in that paper.

6. Evaluation Practice: Select a few recent papers and evaluate and compare them in terms of their structure. You can use the criteria that I mentioned in the workshop.

7. Abstract Evaluation: Read a number of abstracts and try to sort them based on their usefulness in providing you with enough information about the main documents.

8. Subject Map: Select a topic in your discipline and draw a subject map regarding the broader, narrower and related terms. You can use a thesaurus to find preferred terms and make a better map. Also you can use the 5Ws techniques (What, Why, Where, When, Who and How).

9. Literature Review: Select a topic in your area of study and search for it in an academic database to retrieve a number of relevant papers. Then read the papers to find out how each one covers a specific aspect of that topic. Can you find a missing aspect?

10. Comparison: Compare five papers to find out how clear, concise, comprehensive, and coherent they are. You as the reader should judge them. So, do not worry and trust your feeling. Now, if you want to write a paper on the same topic, what would you do to avoid the possible weaknesses in those papers?

ELPUB 2011

2010-12-23T22:15:00.002+03:30

15th International Conference on Electronic Publishing: Digital Publishing and Mobile Technologies will be held in June 2011, in Istanbul. The main themes of the conference include: Digital Publishing and Mobile Applications, Digital Publishing and Libraries, Archives and Museums, Scholarly Communication and Mobile Information Services, Social Networks and Mobile Technologies, Mobile Learning and Digital Cultural Heritage, and Mobile Information Organization and Retrieval.

COLLNET 2011

2010-12-22T20:13:00.003+03:30

Seventh International Conference on Webometrics, Informetrics and Scientometrics (WIS) & Twelfth COLLNET Meeting will take place 20-23 September, 2011, at Istanbul Bilgi University. According to the conference call for paper: the broad focus of the conference is on collaboration and communication in science and technology; science policy; quantitative aspects of science of science; and combination and integration of qualitative and quantitative approaches in study of scientific practices. Theoretical, methodological and applied aspects of the conference can be listed as follows:

Emerging issues in scientometrics / informetrics /webometrics and history of science,

Impact and role of open access and digital libraries on patterns of collaborations and sciences,

Science policy and collaboration,

Collaboration studies for science & society,

Collaboration, knowledge management & industrial partnership,

Collaborative bridge between academic research and industry,

Methods for collaboration studies,

Visualization techniques in collaboration studies,

Quantitative analysis of S&T innovations,

Informetrics laws and distributions, mathematical models of communication or collaboration,

Nature and growth of science and of collaboration in science and its relation with technological output,

Collaboration in science and in technology from both quantitative and qualitative points of view,

Evaluation indicators for scientific productivity and other science related practices.

LIS Research in Australia

2010-12-21T18:25:00.002+03:30

Library & Information Science Research Journal has published a special issue about LIS Research in Australia. These are some of the papers in this issue:

Informed learning: A pedagogical construct attending simultaneously to information use and learning,

Beliefs, attitudes and perceptions about research and practice in a professional field,

Fifty years of LIS education in Australia: Academization of LIS educators in higher education institutions,

Australian PhDs by LIS educators, researchers and practitioners: Depicting diversity and demise,

The contemporary librarian: Skills, knowledge and attributes required in a world of emerging technologies,

The play's the thing: Theater professionals make sense of Shakespeare,

Developing and sustaining a sense of place: The role of social information.

New Library World Current Issue

2010-12-21T18:12:00.005+03:30

New Library World journal has published the 11/12th issue of its 111 Volume. The following papers appeared in this issue.

Public libraries as impartial spaces in a consumer society: possible, plausible, desirable?

Social networking in academic libraries: the possibilities and the concerns,

Library design, learning spaces and academic literacy,

Implementation of the Finnish University Libraries National Information Literacy

Recommendation into academic studies at the Kumpula Science Library, University of Helsinki,

Customizing an open-source tool to enhance information literacy,

Reference tools in Second Life: implications for real life libraries,

Project management in the library.

The Electronic Library

2010-12-21T18:03:00.001+03:30

The Electronic Library Journal has published the 6th issue of its 28th Volume. Some of the papers in this issue are:

Assessment of taxonomy building tools,

Web site accessibility evaluation methods in action: A comparative approach for ministerial web sites in Iran,

Dissemination motives and effects of internet book reviews,

Scientific information transfer: a conceptual model for scientific communication in IranDoc,

Using data mining to improve digital library services,

Recommendation sources on the intention to use e-books in academic digital libraries,

Integrated systems applications in Kuwait academic libraries,

An innovative approach for developing and employing electronic libraries to support context-aware ubiquitous learning.

Online Information Review

2010-12-20T22:24:00.002+03:30

Theses papers have been published in the latest issue of Online Information Review:

Why do members contribute knowledge to online communities?

User evaluation of textual results clustering for web search,

Understanding the consistent use of internet health information,

Three-dimensional context-aware tailoring of information,

How to improve trust toward electronic banking,

Antecedents and consequences of trust in online product recommendations: An empirical study in social shopping,

Genre analysis of bookmarked webpages,

Pragmatic issues in calculating and comparing the quantity and quality of research through rating and ranking of researchers based on peer reviews and bibliometric indicators from Web of Science, Scopus and Google Scholar.

Journal of Documentation: Vol. 66, No. 6

2010-12-20T22:07:00.003+03:30

Journal of Documentation has published the 6th Issue of it 66th Volume. Titles of some papers in this issue are:

Documentary tools in everyday life: the wedding planner,

Opening and closing rituals of the virtual reference service of the Internet Public Library,

The individual and social dynamics of knowledge sharing: an exploratory study,

Managing documents at home for serious leisure: a case study of the hobby of gourmet cooking,

A multilevel model of HIV/AIDS information/help network development,

How poor informationally are the information poor?: Evidence from an empirical study of daily and regular information practices of individuals,

Carbon footprint of the knowledge sector: what's the future?

Findings of the last paper is very interesting: "... The current practices for production and distribution of printed knowledge products generate an enormous amount of CO2. It is estimated that the book industry in the UK and USA alone produces about 1.8 million tonnes and about 11.27 million tonnes of CO2 respectively. CO2 emission for the worldwide journal publishing industry is estimated to be about 12 million tonnes. It is shown that the production and distribution costs of digital knowledge products are negligible compared to the environmental costs of production and distribution of printed knowledge products."

What Links Research to Practice

2010-12-20T21:45:00.002+03:30

Today morning I was one of the speakers in the Research Week Seminar at our university. The title of my speech was: Evidence-based Library and Information Practice: A Link between Research, Planning and Decision Making. If you would like to have the slides, please email me.

Stable and Transient Nature of the Internet

2010-12-19T22:27:00.002+03:30

In a brief note in IBNA, I explained how the Internet resources are, at the same time, so ephemeral and so stable. I also described some of the reasons that contribute to making such a dynamic and paradoxical context.

JASIS&T Latest Issue

2010-12-18T08:29:00.001+03:30

Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST) is one of the most prestigious and influential peer reviewed journals in LIS and has been published continuously since 1950. Recently, JASIS&T has published the 12th issue of its 61 volume (December 2010). Titles of some papers appeared in this issue are:

Last but not least: Additional positional effects on citation and readership in arXiv,

Co-citation analysis, bibliographic coupling, and direct citation: Which citation approach represents the research front most accurately?

A comparison of two techniques for bibliometric mapping: Multidimensional scaling and VOS,

Power law distributions in information science: Making the case for logarithmic binning,

The effect of folder structure on personal file navigation,

Requirements and use of in-service information in an engineering redesign task: Case studies from the aerospace industry,

The effect of spelling and retrieval system familiarity on search behavior in online public access catalogs: A mixed methods study,

Member activities and quality of tags in a collection of historical photographs in Flickr,

Influences of users' familiarity with visual search topics on interactive video digital libraries,

Using structural information to improve search in Web collections,

A new context-dependent term weight computed by boost and discount using relevance information,

Adapting semantic natural language processing technology to address information overload in influenza epidemic management,

Sentiment in short strength detection informal text.

Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries

2010-12-18T08:18:00.001+03:30

The International Conference on Theory and Practice of Digital Libraries (TPDL) 2011 continues the tradition of the European Conference on Research and Advanced Technology for Digital Libraries (ECDL). The conference is going to bring together researchers, developers, content providers and users in the field of digital libraries. 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). More details are available here.

Social Theory in Information Systems Research

2010-12-17T22:51:00.002+03:30

The 17th Americas Conference on Information Systems (AMCIS), will take place in Detroit, Michigan, August 4-7, 2011. In one of the panels, researchers in this area will focus on research that makes use of social theory to investigate the dynamics of online and virtual communities. According to their call for contributions: “… they seek to attract research papers, research-in-progress papers, and panels from all IS researchers who are using the work of social theorists, organizational theorists, socio-technical theorists, and cultural anthropologists in their online and virtual communities research. They are particularly interested in research that makes use of social theory to address issues of virtual collaborations. They will address issues such as:

How and under what conditions do these communities form, self-organize, maintain and manage themselves and dissolve?

What are the roles that information and communication technologies play n the dynamics of online and virtual communities?

Information Research

2010-12-17T22:34:00.002+03:30

The latest issue of Information Research (Volume 15 No 3 September, 2010) was published. To read the papers please follow this link.

Taming the Information Tsunami

2010-12-17T22:30:00.003+03:30

The 53rd NFAIS Annual Conference will discuss Taming the Information Tsunami: The New World of Discovery. Main issues to explore in this meeting are:

How can content providers efficiently navigate the information tsunami to provide scholars and researchers with the reliable, relevant information that deserves their time and attention - no matter what the source or format?

How does that information get filtered, made consumable, and incorporated into workflows?

What roles can semantic search, image search and the social graph play in finding the specific information that users want?

Who is improving the overall search experience with touch technologies, predictive tools and personalized search?

How can large volumes of information across all media be acquired, processed and transmitted to an increasingly mobile and collaborative global research community?

Where is that content stored - on the desk, shelves, servers or in the Cloud?

And what new business practices are emerging that are in sync with the delivery of data "chunks" and expectations for reuse of content?

Excellent Library Science Blogs

2010-12-17T22:00:00.004+03:30

My weblog has been noted as one of 50 excellent library science blogs worth reading. In this list my weblog is 48th. Also in another list of “100 Best Blogs for Library Science Students” my blog is the 15th in the technology section.

Peter Drucker

2010-12-12T22:03:00.004+03:30

“The most important thing in communication is to hear what isn't being said.”

“Trying to predict the future is like trying to drive down a country road at night with no lights while looking out the back window.”

“The only thing we know about the future is that it will be different.”

“We now accept the fact that learning is a lifelong process of keeping abreast of change. And the most pressing task is to teach people how to learn.”

“Meetings are a symptom of bad organization. The fewer meetings the better.”

“Whenever you see a successful business, someone once made a courageous decision”

“Efficiency is doing things right; effectiveness is doing the right things.”

“Time is the scarcest resource and unless it is managed nothing else can be managed.”

“Doing the right thing is more important than doing the thing right.”

“One cannot buy, rent or hire more time. The supply of time is totally inelastic. No matter how high the demand, the supply will not go up. There is no price for it. Time is totally perishable and cannot be stored. Yesterday's time is gone forever, and will never come back. Time is always in short supply. There is no substitute for time. Everything requires time. All work takes place in, and uses up time. Yet most people take for granted this unique, irreplaceable and necessary resource.”

Qualitative Research in Web 2.0

2010-12-10T22:36:00.004+03:30

The international conference on Qualitative Research in Web 2.0 will be held on the 22 & 23 February 2011 in Macau, China. The conference will explore critical issues and opportunities of implementing online qualitative research. The themes are:

What are the advantages and disadvantages of conducting qualitative research online?

Integrating Web 2.0 into traditional qualitative research

Understanding when to use online methods over traditional methods

How to design, execute and report online qualitative research studies?

Developing participant recruitment strategies

Keeping stakeholders engaged: how to keep clients involved in your online research

Discussing challenges while carrying out qualitative analyses in social media

Developing engaging market research online communities for qualitative research

Exploring the use online research community for understanding cultural assumptions

Evaluating different types of approaches with the online research community

Discussing the use of multiple online communities for one large research study

Identifying the pros and cons of MROCs over online panel and focus groups

Utilising a mobile platforms to capture the 'moment': capturing text, pictures and videos in real-time

Utilising cutting-edge online qualitative research techniques for evaluating government web applications

Two Seminars in One Day

2010-12-09T17:54:00.003+03:30

Yesterday I had a busy day, as I delivered two presentations in two different seminars. In the morning I was one of the speakers in a seminar in Tehran called “Public Libraries, Life Long Learning and Popularization of Science”. The title of my paper was: “The Role of Public Libraries in Enhancement of Science Acceptance in the Society”.
In the afternoon, I attended ILISA monthly seminar at the National Library to make a speech about my experience of visiting the Department of Information Studies and Interactive Media at Tampere University in August. The seminar was organized for LIS scholars and students to share their experience and thoughts about the usefulness of sabbatical and study leaves. Reports about these two events are available here and here.

Digital Enabled Social Networks

2010-12-03T11:25:00.002+03:30

The next special issue of Information Systems Journal (ISJ) will focus on “Interpreting Digital Enabled Social Networks”. According to the journal’s call for paper: “The aim of this special issue is to advance the state of social network research within the IS field by discussing and disseminating empirical results gained through interpretative studies ... topics may include, but are not limited to the following:

New qualitative approaches to study digital enabled social networks

Assessing the nature and quality of information exchange and knowledge creation in digital enabled social networks

IS case studies that describe how digital enabled social networks can be harnessed in organisational settings

Open innovation/co-creation through digital enabled social networks

Interpretative studies investigating entrepreneurship and the rise of occupational communities through digital enabled social networks

Interpretative insights of leadership and governance in digital enabled social networks

Qualitative approaches to examine the interplay between online and offline social networks

Social networks and IT adoption

Interpretative studies to ascertain the role of ICT in the diffusion of information, trends, behaviours, and innovations in social networks

Combining social network analysis and qualitative approaches in IS research
Methodological issues in IS social network research

Critical reviews of the digital enabled social network literature."

Internet and Teacher Education

2010-12-02T16:43:00.005+03:30

The latest issue of “Internet and Higher Education” was published. This is a Special Issue on “The Internet and Teacher Education: An Asian Experience”. Titles of some papers in this issue are:

The Internet and teacher education: Traversing between the digitized world and schools,

Exploring freshmen pre-service teachers' situated knowledge in reflective reports during case-based activities,

Using wikis to develop student teachers' learning, teaching, and assessment,

The integration of synchronous communication technology into service learning for pre-service teachers' online tutoring of middle school students,

Virtual environments and the ongoing work of becoming a Singapore teacher,

Promoting awareness of Internet safety in Taiwan in-service teacher education: A ten-year experience,

The correlates of Taiwan teachers' epistemological beliefs concerning Internet environments, online search strategies, and search outcomes.

Reading Quotes

2010-12-02T10:46:00.001+03:30

“To learn to read is to light a fire; every syllable that is spelled out is a spark.” Victor Hugo

“A capacity and taste for reading gives access to whatever has already been discovered by others.” Abraham Lincoln

“When you sell a man a book you don't sell him just 12 ounces of paper and ink and glue - you sell him a whole new life.” Christopher Morley

“No matter how busy you may think you are, you must find time for reading, or surrender yourself to self-chosen ignorance.” Confucius

“Reading without reflecting is like eating without digesting.” Edmund Burke

“Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed, and some few are to be chewed and digested.” Francis Bacon

“Every reader finds himself. The writer's work is merely a kind of optical instrument that makes it possible for the reader to discern what, without this book, he would perhaps never have seen in himself.” Marcel Proust

“Anyone who says they have only one life to live must not know how to read a book”. Author Unknown

“The man who does not read good books has no advantage over the man who can't read.” Mark Twain

“A classic is something that everybody wants to have read and nobody wants to read.” Mark Twain

“A writer only begins a book. A reader finishes it.” Samuel Johnson

Reading Octagon

2010-12-02T10:04:00.004+03:30

Recently I suggested a simple and tentative conceptual framework about the effectiveness of reading process. I called this framework the “Reading Octagon”, as it has eight components including:

Independent and Continuous Reading

Appropriate and Balanced Reading

Diverse and Recreational Reading

Authentic and Complementary Reading

Parallel and Symmetrical Reading

Coherent and Consistent Reading

Critical and Meticulous Reading

Efficient and Productive Reading

I think a successful reader who is a lifelong learner usually passes these stages in her/his reading process. I know some of these phrases might seem a bit ambiguous or even odd, but I have specific definition for each element. To make them clear, hopefully, I’ll explain each one in the near future. However, I had an interview with LISNA and illustrate each element in more details. To read the interview, please take a look at this link.

The Value of Reading

2010-12-01T23:16:00.004+03:30

While browsing a number of websites about “Reading”, I came across wonderful statements about the value and importance of reading, and I only mention a few of them here. The first one comes from the “New Zealand Book Council” and the second one from “The Reading Agency”:

"Like no other human activity reading opens up our imagination. It enables us to understand those around us. It allows us to project the future and reach back into the past. Reading can entertain, challenge and educate. We believe that reading can transform people's lives."

"We believe that reading can transform people's lives. The more you read the more you know. The more you read, the more you imagine. The more you read, the better you understand, and the better you can connect to people. Our mission is to inspire more people to read more."

These statements seem really simple and obvious, but if you take a closer look at them, then you will find out how profoundly they have been written and how easily we may forget about the value of reading.

Internet Hidden and Obvious Paradoxes

2010-11-29T20:50:00.003+03:30

I have written a brief note in the recent issue of Atf magazine entitled “Internet Hidden and Obvious Paradoxes”. In this note I explained 16 paradoxes in the online environment. For example, we have to deal with the increasing information overload and information scarcity at the same time, the scarceness which has happened as a result of too much information. Because we have to spend plenty of time to find useful information in a huge pool of useless and irrelevant data. To read the full text of this note, please follow this link.

INTECH 2011

2010-11-27T08:07:00.003+03:30

The first "International Conference on Integrated Information Technology" (INTECH 2011) will take place at the Federal University of Sao Carlos, Brazil. The proceedings will be published by Springer. The topics to be discussed are the following: Integrated Computational Science and Engineering, Distributed Computing, Integrated Communication Technology, Computer Graphics and Multimedia, Integrated System Administration, Networking, and Visualization, Integrated Software Models and Developments, Computing Technology in Education, Government, Business, Industry and other areas, Simulation and Modelling, Integrated Data Mining, Federated Networking, Federated Databases, Image Processing in High Tech Environments, Unified Programming Languages, Information Technology Applications in Different Domains and also Fusion of Information Technology.

BIS 2011

2010-11-25T12:13:00.003+03:30

The 14th International Conference on Business Information Systems (BIS 2011) will take place in Poznan, Poland, June 15-17, 2011. Topics include:

* 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 and aggregation

* Contexts
- Location-aware and geography-centric information systems
- Wireless and mobile applications
- Multi-agent distributed systems
- Semantic web personalization
- Ambient computing

* Content Retrieval and Filtering
- Hidden Web search and crawling
- Data integration from Web information sources
- Modeling and describing evolving data sources
- Adaptive integration of evolving data sources
- Information gathering for knowledge-intensive enterprises
- Search over semi-structural Web sources
- Business models for a content

* Collaboration
- Knowledge-based collaboration
- Social networks and social wikis
- Enterprise mashups, Enterprise 2.0
- Infrastructures for collaboration (P2P, TSC, etc.)
- Semantic grid
- Security in distributed systems
- Web-based model for discoverability, consumption, and reuse

* Web Services
- Service oriented computing (SOA)
- Semantic web services
- Composition, choreography and orchestration
- Open, decentralized self-service
- Trust and quality of service (QoS)
- Service level agreements

Reports on My Book

2010-11-25T11:55:00.002+03:30

The news of my book is available on both IBNA (Iranian Book News Agency) and LISNA (Library and Information Science News Agency) websites.

Process of Peer Review

2010-11-23T20:33:00.003+03:30

Today afternoon I delivered a presentation at the third meeting of LIS journals’ chief editors in Tehran. The topic of my presentation was about the process of Peer Review and the possible challenges and difficulties that a journal’s editorial board in general, and reviewers in particular, might encounter during refereeing process. I also suggested a number of research topics on this issue that might be useful for those who are working on this field. I will upload the PowerPoint file of this presentation on my homepage for everyone who might be interested to find out more details about it.

Essential Skills for Teachers ...

2010-11-23T20:22:00.003+03:30

Today morning I had a workshop in Tehran entitled "Essential Skills for Teachers and Students to Evaluate the Quality, Usability and Authenticity of Electronic Resources". I'll upload the PowerPoint file on my homepage for everyone who might be interested to find out more details about this event.

Basics of Academic Writing

2010-11-21T23:09:00.001+03:30

My new book entitled "Basics of Academic Writing" was published. The book, which is in Persian, includes 75000 words in 263 pages and 9 chapters as follows:

1. An Introduction to Paper Writing (Basic Concepts and Definitions)
2. Principles of Academic Approach in Writing (e.g. Authenticity)
3. General Structure of Scientific Papers
4. Main Features of a Good Paper (100 Features in 20 Categories)
5. Research Originality (Avoiding Plagiarism)
6. Practice in Writing (e.g. Free Writing and etc.)
7. Evaluation Criteria to Select a Journal
8. Paper Submission and Addressing Referees’ Comments
9. Dissertation and Thesis Writing (Including 100 Hints)

Crowdsourcing for Information Retrieval

2010-11-14T18:50:00.003+03:30

Information Retrieval Journal is going to publish a special Issue on "Crowdsourcing for Information Retrieval". In their Call for papers, it is mentioned that: "the advent of crowdsourcing is revolutionizing information technology by enabling a wide host of new methodology for data collection, annotation, and processing, as well as system design and evaluation. Given the massive datasets that are both ubiquitous and rapidly growing in today’s digital age, the field of information retrieval (IR) stands to particularly benefit from such advances as academic researchers and industrial practitioners alike leverage the wisdom of crowds to more effective cope with and exploit massive datasets. The novelty of crowdsourcing makes this is an especially exciting time to focus the IR community’s attention toward it and provide an opportunity for discussion and education on this key emerging area. Traditionally manual-labor intensive processes have been particularly impacted by dramatically reducing the time, cost, and effort involved."
Topics of interest include but are not limited to the following areas:

* Theoretical, experimental, and/or methodological developments advancing state-of-the-art knowledge of crowdsourcing for IR.

* Novel applications of IR enabled by crowdsourcing (e.g. use of real-time crowd response, using human computation to “close the loop” with automation for hybrid IR systems, etc.)

* Tutorials or best practices on employing crowdsourcing to support different IR scenarios.

* Innovative ideas for better using crowdsourcing platforms.

* Description of novel software packages improving ease and/or quality of crowdsourcing.

* Reflective or forward-looking vision on use of crowdsourcing in this area.

Multimedia Data Annotation and Retrieval

2010-11-12T21:36:00.003+03:30

The Multimedia Tools and Applications Journal is going to publish a special issue on "Multimedia Data Annotation and Retrieval using Web 2.0". The main aim of this issue is to assess the current approaches and technologies, as well as to outline the major challenges and future perspectives, related to the use of Web 2.0 in providing automatic annotation and easing retrieval and access control of multimedia data. It aims to provide an overview of the state of the art and future directions in this field, by including a wide range of interdisciplinary contributions from various research groups. Topics of interest include the following: Semantic Web and Web 2.0, Social Networks, Multimedia Semantics, Contextual Multimedia Metadata, Annotation Enriching, Query Rewriting, Metadata Modeling and Contextual Ontologies for Multimedia Applications, Management of Multimedia Metadata (Relational and XML Databases, Semantic Stores, etc.), Multimedia Authoring, Multimedia-based Access Control and Authorization, Multimedia Retrieval, Personalizing Multimedia Content, Cross-media Clustering, Mobile Applications, Multimedia Web Applications and Related Metadata Support and Novel and Challenging Multimedia Applications.

LibrAsia 2011

2010-11-12T09:16:00.002+03:30

The International Academic Forum in conjunction with its global partners is going to hold the Inaugural Asian Conference on Literature and Librarianship (LibAsia) from May 27-30 2011, at the Ramada Osaka, Japan. The main conference themes are: "Ancient and Modern" & "Journeys of Discovery". Regarding the conference’s announcement, LibrAsia 2011 is not only an academic conference, but also offer a number of talks, workshops, and readings of original works of interdisciplinary and intercultural discussion.”

Happiness

2010-11-12T08:46:00.004+03:30

The best way to cheer yourself up is to try to cheer somebody else up. Mark Twain

If you want to be happy, be. Leo Tolstoy

Happiness is not an ideal of reason, but of imagination. Immanuel Kant

If there were in the world today any large number of people who desired their own happiness more than they desired the unhappiness of others, we could have a paradise in a few years. Bertrand Russell

My crown is called content, a crown that seldom kings enjoy. William Shakespeare

You cannot always have happiness, but you can always give happiness. Author Unknown

Happiness always looks small while you hold it in your hands, but let it go, and you learn at once how big and precious it is. Maxim Gorky

Some pursue happiness, others create it. Author Unknown

The best way for a person to have happy thoughts is to count his blessings and not his cash. Author Unknown

Being happy is something you have to learn. I often surprise myself by saying "Wow, this is it. I guess I'm happy. I got a home I love. A career that I love. I'm even feeling more and more at peace with myself." If there's something else to happiness, let me know. I'm ambitious for that, too. Harrison Ford

Joy can be real only if people look upon their life as a service, and have a definite object in life outside themselves and their personal happiness. Leo Tolstoy

There is neither happiness nor misery in the world; there is only the comparison of one state to another, nothing more. He who has felt the deepest grief is best able to experience supreme happiness. We must have felt what it is to die, that we may appreciate the enjoyments of life. Alexandre Dumas

The perfection of wisdom, and the end of true philosophy is to proportion our wants to our possessions, our ambitions to our capacities, we will then be a happy and a virtuous people. Mark Twain

Whoever is happy will make others happy, too. Mark Twain

If you want happiness for an hour – take a nap. If you want happiness for a day – go fishing. If you want happiness for a month – get married. If you want happiness for a year – inherit a fortune. If you want happiness for a lifetime – help someone else. Chinese Proverb

The happiness that is genuinely satisfying is accompanied by the fullest exercise of our faculties and the fullest realization of the world in which we live. Bertrand Russell

Public Libraries in the World Science Day

2010-11-10T22:50:00.002+03:30

The World Science Day for Peace and Development (WSDPD) is celebrated on 10 November each year. Today, for this occasion, in an interview with IBNA I talked about the key roles of public libraries in the process of popularization of science in the society. The transcription of this interview is available here.

Evidence Based LIS

2010-11-08T18:53:00.002+03:30

I have written a brief column in LISNA about the basics of Evidence Based Librarianship. This is the link to this note.

What is Success?

2010-11-07T19:48:00.002+03:30

"The most successful men in the end are those whose success is the result of steady accretion. . . It is the man who carefully advances step by step, with his mind becoming wider and wider and progressively better able to grasp any theme or situation , persevering in what he knows to be practical, and concentrating his thought upon it, who is bound to succeed in the greatest degree." Alexander Graham Bell

"Try not to become a man of success, but rather to become a man of value. He is considered successful in our day who gets more out of life than he puts in. But a man of value will give more than he receives." Albert Einstein

"The first requisite of success is the ability to apply your physical and mental energies to one problem without growing weary." Thomas Edison

"I've failed over and over and over again in my life and that is why I succeed." Michael Jordan

Many of life's failures are people who did not realize how close they were to success when they gave up. Thomas A. Edison

"Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get. Dale Carnegie

"A successful man continues to look for work after he has found a job." Anonymous

"Choice, not circumstances determines your success." Anonymous

"The most important question to ask on the job is not "what am I getting?" The most important question to ask is "What am I becoming?" Anonymous

"Success does not come to those who wait . . . and it does not wait for anyone to come to it." Anonymous

"Success: willing to do what the average person is not willing to do." Anonymous

Value of Scholarly and Scientific Output

2010-11-02T13:58:00.003+03:30

The workshop entitled “Assessing the Usage and Value of Scholarly and Scientific Output: An Overview of Traditional and Emerging Metrics” will take place on November 10, 2010 in Philadelphia. Experts in the fields of scientometrics will attend this event to discuss the new methods that are becoming increasingly important for measuring the usage and value of scholarly and scientific content, including large scientific data sets, and how those measures complement the more traditional, well-known approaches. The titles of some of the sessions and talks in this workshop are: The Usage Approach to Measuring Value; Evaluating the Use and Impacts of Scientific Data; The Eigenfactor; A New Perspective in Journal Metrics; The Citation Approach to Measuring Value: Citation Indexes, Journal Metrics, and the Impact Factors; Usage Statistics from the Librarian and Publisher Perspectives. The details of this event is available here.

Louis Pasteur

2010-10-31T19:04:00.003+03:30

Let me tell you the secret that has led me to my goal: my strength lies solely in my tenacity.

Whether our efforts are, or not, favoured by life, let us be able to say, when we come near the great goal: I have done what I could.

Science knows no country, because knowledge belongs to humanity, and is the torch which illuminates the world. Science is the highest personification of the nation because that nation will remain the first which carries the furthest the works of thought and intelligence.

There are no such things as applied sciences, only applications of science.

I am utterly convinced that Science and Peace will triumph over Ignorance and War, that nations will eventually unite not to destroy but to edify, and that the future will belong to those who have done the most for the sake of suffering humanity.

In the fields of observation chance favours only the prepared mind. (Louis Pasteur)

Victor Hugo

2010-10-31T19:02:00.001+03:30

Laughter is the sun that drives winter from the human face.

Music expresses that which cannot be said and on which it is impossible to be silent.

People do not lack strength; they lack will.

Short as life is, we make it still shorter by the careless waste of time.

To be perfectly happy it does not suffice to possess happiness, it is necessary to have deserved it.

If a writer wrote merely for his time, I would have to break my pen and throw it away. (Victor Hugo)

Professor Saracevic’s 80th Birthday

2010-10-29T21:17:00.003+03:30

The colleagues of Professor Tefko Saracevic have organized a one-day conference on November 8 at Rutgers University to celebrate his 80th birthday. Professor Saracevic is one of the most prominent scholars in Information Science, and has published many influential works in this field for more than four decades. In particular, his seminal papers on the concept of Relevance and the definition of Information Science made a great impact in our field. I always enjoyed reading his wonderful papers, and once had the chance of meeting him during SIGIR conference in 2004. The details of this birthday party is available here.

50 Topics in Scientometrics Research

2010-10-29T20:58:00.000+03:30

Recently, I published a paper entitled “50 Research Topics in Scientometrics Studies”. The full text of this paper is available here.

External Examiner in Isfahan

2010-10-29T20:41:00.005+03:30

This Tuesday (26 October) I was an external examiner for an MSc dissertation at the University of Isfahan. The title of this dissertation was “Designing a Model for Context-Aware Recommender Systems in Digital Libraries”. The researcher used Grounded Theory to investigate contextual factors influential in the process of the selection and decision making in recommender systems in digital libraries. The central concept developed in this research named Scientific Research Ground (SRG). SRG has contexts which situate individuals in a range of conditions when interacting with computerized systems. Users’ attributes such as purposes, activities, information literacy and skills, mental status, supposition, assumption, occupational condition, social status are some of such contexts. In general, it was a profound study with a good contribution to the area.

Overall Evaluation of Libraries’ Goodness

2010-10-29T20:27:00.001+03:30

In an interview with IBNA, I talked about the main criteria that we need to evaluate the success and goodness of a library in general. The full text of this interview is available here.

Exploring Peoples and Places

2010-10-24T20:55:00.003+03:30

Canadian Association for Information Science is going to hold its 39th Annual Conference at the University of New Brunswick/St. Thomas University, Fredericton, New Brunswick in June 2 – 4th, 2011. The conference theme is “Coasts and Continents: Exploring Interactions of People, Places and Information”. In parallel with this theme, CAIS 2011 will focus the physical, virtual, social, intellectual, organizational, and documentary spaces and places in which informing is enacted and documents are created and used. Also, the people who inhabit these places and spaces and the work they do.

Information Fluency Conference

2010-10-21T22:57:00.001+03:30

The 2011 Information Fluency Conference will take place March 9 –11 in Orlando. Possible topics for presentations include: What critical thinking skills are necessary to use the information technologies wisely?; Effectively developing IF skills in students; IF across the disciplines; Intellectual property & plagiarism in the digital age; Defining Information Fluency in a digital age; Assessment of IF initiatives & Retention of IF Skills; Academic Discernment on the Internet; Legal Issues in the Digital Age; Writing and Research Assignments in Large Classes; Librarian as Teacher; What Makes a Graduate Information Fluent?; Assessing Student Learning Outcomes and IF Instruction; Evidence Based Practice and Information Fluency; Using Interactive Technology in IF; Engaging the Undergraduate Audience in IF and Engaging the Graduate Student in IF.

Blogging across Borders and Cultures

2010-10-14T20:45:00.002+03:30

International Journal of Interactive Communication Systems and Technologies (IJICST) is going to publish a Special Issue on Blogging across Borders and Cultures. In the journal’s call for paper it has been mentioned that: " ... since the late 1990s, Internet users have utilized blogs as one of the most ubiquitous communication tools to connect with audiences worldwide. Today blogging is firmly entrenched into the fabric of contemporary society. Versatile blogging systems provide unlimited access to web-publishing platforms that are free, preprogrammed, and easy to use. An example of social interactive technologies application used for generating and distributing content, blogging offers people of diverse backgrounds and organizations from both public and private realms ample opportunities for communication, interaction, sharing, and collaboration." In the Objective of the Special Issue the journal announced that: “IJICST focuses on a broad spectrum of second-generation web-based interactive technologies, their applications, functions, and services. This special issue aims to provide a broad audience of academics, researchers and practitioners with a cross-disciplinary examination of blogging issues, contexts, concepts, and trends in diverse contexts and at various levels of communication. Topics in this special issue include the following:
• Diffusion of blogging across geographical regions and cultures
• Impact and applications of blogging systems and technologies
• Issues, viewpoints, and perspectives on blogging in diverse contexts
and at various levels of communication
• Theories, philosophies, visions, principles, and functionalities of
blogging

How to Write a Research Proposal

2010-10-07T12:22:00.004+03:30

Yesterday I had a workshop on "Research Proposal Writing" at the School of Economic Science in Tehran. In this workshop, which was held for a number of MA students from various Economic Science fields, I talked about the main features of a good research proposal, that they need to develop before the beginning of their dissertation. In general, I believe a good research proposal should firstly illustrate the originality, importance, necessity, and aims of the study. Moreover, it should include research questions, hypotheses, anticipated results, a brief review of the literature and research limits and limitations.

The Best Library in the World

2010-10-05T22:25:00.004+03:30

I have written a note in Atf magazine entitled "Where is the Best Library in the World?". It was published today and now you can read it here.

EBLIP New Issue

2010-10-01T23:58:00.002+03:30

Evidence Based Library and Information Practice has just published its latest issue. Some of the papers in this issue are: The Impact of the Acquisition of Electronic Medical Texts on the Usage of Equivalent Print Books in an Academic Medical Library; and Learning in Simulations: Examining the Effectiveness of Information Literacy Instruction Using Middle School Students’ Portfolio Products.

Weblog Changes the Web

2010-10-01T22:04:00.006+03:30

While looking in my old files, I came across a piece of writing that I have written it in 2005 and as far as I remember, I never published it somewhere. I even can not remember why I wrote it five years ago! Anyway, I would like to upload it here now to share it with you.

Weblog Changes the Web: a Personal View

Since the early years of 1990s the Web has changed the world and now Weblog is changing the web. While writing this paper, the Microsoft Word programme puts a red line under the word “Weblog” indicating this is a wrong spelling and should be changed. However, weblog is one of our today’s buzzwords and probably will be consider in the next version of this software. It shows weblog has come to our daily conversation recently. Nevertheless, its growth and popularity has been extraordinary.

Weblog is a convenient tool for publishing various kinds of information. It is a multidimensional phenomenon in the web environment. It represents diverse meanings and applications for different people. It can be just a new form of diary for a teenager, a learning journal for a research student, a subject gateway for a scholar or a tribune for a politician in exile.

An astonishing growth of the number and diversity of the weblogs is notable. If somebody claims the growth rate of blogging has been much faster than any other web-based activities it seems acceptable and it would not be an exaggeration. Here, there are two main questions in relation to weblog. What does make a weblog different with a website? and what is the mystique of the weblog’s popularity?

The answer of both questions can be found through mulling over the distinctive features of a weblog. A weblog not only would contain all features and advantages of an ordinary website such as containing text, picture, audio-visual attractions and links but also it possesses something more. A weblog’s contents are constantly changed and updated usually based on a chronological order. It is like a periodical that continues through the time while a website’s hardly enjoys this characteristic. On the other hand, establishing a weblog is so easy, much easier than the other e-publishing facilities. In the last but not at the least, the interactive feature of weblog makes it more fascinating for both weblog poster and the reader.

Weblog is not just a place for putting information; it is a reliable and effective device to getting and gathering information too. It is not just for speaking, it is an opportunity for listening as well. Therefore, the weblog is an arena for dialog, the things that now human kind needs it more crucially than ever. Making a weblog is a sort of thinking with loud voice and an escape door from loneliness and isolation. Therefore interactivity is one of the major mystiques of weblog’s popularity.

Its other attractive property is the archiving facility that preserves the previous materials over the time and the poster of the weblog can mange and categorize them according posting date or based on the topic. Usually, in definition of weblog, it is compared with diary. Although this comparison is not wrong, it is not all-inclusive. An ordinary diary is production of just one individual and is read just by the writer or occasionally by his/her relatives, except it would be published someday.

Diary publication is usually limited to the famous people and more often than not after their death! So there is no chance to develop it regarding the reader’s views or for sharing the ideas. However, the condition of the weblog is entirely different. A diary is a device to archive somebody’s thoughts and memories, while a weblog is a live position for dialog and communication.

Although Weblog starts off by its reader’s willing, it continues with cooperation of its readers as well. Naturally, the readers’ comments affect on the next contents and also a weblog always includes the writer and readers view together. Weblog world is the real web; it is a web of thoughts, news and views. People write their ideas and feelings and the others empathize, sympathize, criticize or admire them. Particularly the opportunity of anonymity of the writer and reader make an atmosphere of liberty and frankness. Generally, the benefits of this free atmosphere are more than its disadvantages.

As a summary, what differentiate the Weblog from the other facilities of the web are its fantastic features in service of human communication. Weblog is so significant because it is easy to use, interactive and chronological. It continues through the time. These characteristics bring back the readers again and again. Each weblog can act as a daily personal newspaper which is usually managed by one (in single-poster weblogs) or few persons (in multi-poster weblogs) and is read by many.

Finally, for information science professionals weblog is a new area of research. There are many research potential to carry our new studies about this remarkable phenomenon. Content analysis of different groups of weblogs, investigating the weblog posting and weblog reading on people’s life and prospective roles of weblog to enhance information accessibility are just a few examples.

Intensive Editing and Proofreading

2010-10-01T00:12:00.001+03:30

Over the last 24 hours I have been proofreading the first fourth chapters of a book that I have been writing over the last two years, of course, not constantly. Now the book is in its final stages and I am doing its final works. I need a few more days to finish the proofreading. Now, this is the early hours of October, and hopefully, the book will come out before the end of this month.

2010 Best JASIST Paper Award

2010-09-29T08:46:00.004+03:30

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.

Collaborative Information Seeking in IPM

2010-09-24T12:32:00.001+03:30

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 knowledge for synchronous collaborative information retrieval; Role-based results redistribution for collaborative information retrieval; and also Social summarization in collaborative web search.

Reference Interview

2010-09-22T17:16:00.000+03:30

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.

Measures and Criteria for Evaluation

2010-09-22T17:01:00.002+03:30

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.

Journal of Academic Librarianship

2010-09-18T10:17:00.000+04:30

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.

EBLIP6: Valuing Knowledge and Expertise

2010-09-16T16:48:00.004+04:30

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 EBLIP
* Applicable methods for EBLIP
* Implementing evidence based practice into systems or culture
Evidence Based Practice: Innovation, Education and Research
* EBLIP in the LIS curriculum
* Web 2.0 as a vehicle for enabling EBLIP
* Evaluating Web 2.0 using the EBLIP model
* The inter-relation of innovation, good practice and EBLIP
* Relationship between EBLIP and research
As I am member of the International Programme Committee at this conference, I will write more detailed posts in the next entries. Abstract submission is open now and for more information you can visit the conference website.

MA Dissertations on Evaluation of Library Website

2010-09-16T10:31:00.002+04:30

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

2010-09-10T23:30:00.003+04:30

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

2010-09-10T01:19:00.001+04:30

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 of informetrics literature 1987–2008.

ITNG 2011

2010-09-07T19:20:00.001+04:30

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.

Journal of Academic Librarianship

2010-08-30T15:40:00.001+04:30

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.

Digital Curation Conference

2010-08-27T09:18:00.001+04:30

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.

ICoLIS 2010

2010-08-21T22:49:00.001+04:30

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.

A-LIEP 2011

2010-08-18T09:10:00.002+04:30

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.

Contextual Cocitation Analysis

2010-08-16T21:29:00.003+04:30

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.

Evaluating Web Search Engines

2010-08-14T11:20:00.000+04:30

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 spectrum of queries ranges from trivial to highly specific; the usage scenarios range from private to professional ... topics of interest may focus on but are not restricted to: 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, Index and/or Results Freshness, Diversity of Results, Search Features Comparison and Influence of Search Engine Optimization (SEO) on Results Quality."

IBERSID 2010

2010-08-05T16:45:00.001+04:30

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.

Students Writing Skills

2010-08-05T16:33:00.004+04:30

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.

ECDL 2010

2010-08-04T17:43:00.001+04:30

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 Visualization in Digital Libraries.

Pioneer LIS Research Areas

2010-08-04T13:10:00.001+04:30

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.