The Invisible Web Weblog

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

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.

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!

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 an...

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 ...

"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 s...

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)

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)

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 ...

I wrote a column in IBNA about the similarities between sport and study (reading). I think there are at least 20 resemblances between these two activities. To read the note, please follow this link .

During this Nowrouz holiday, I had a chance to read a few books including “Tuesdays with Morrie”, which is a non-fiction novel written by Mitch Albom. Tuesdays with Morrie is an inspiring book, full of wonderful advices for everyone who wants to be a better and happier person.

Happy Nowrouz and Happy New Year, with the best wishes! I hope this year brings health, success and happiness for everyone. Today is the tenth day of the new year and after a few days holiday, I am getting back to normal. My New Year's resolution is: "eating less, and working more!"

Today is the first day of 2010 and I would take this opportunity to say “Happy New Year!” to all the readers of this weblog and wish them all the best in 2010. This is the seventh year that I am blogging here, though I have lost the archive of my first weblog from 2003 to 2005. Hopefully, in 2010 this weblog will be more informative and I hope to spend more time to keep it up-to-date.

Today I was the external examiner for a PhD thesis in Tehran. The research was about the concept of interoperability for data exchange in digital libraries. As the external examiner, I did my refereeing in four levels including the originality of the research topic, the research methodology that has been employed to address the research questions, the content and structure of the thesis, and finally how the student addressed the questions in the viva session.

This is the first day of 2009 and I say Happy New Year to the readers of my weblog. I hope this year brings success and happiness for everyone.

Two days ago I took part in a live radio panel which was about the "Book Week" in Iran and the related issues to reading habits in the society. In addition to these topics I also briefly talked about the information literacy and how it affects our information seeking behaviours. Just in case you would like to listen to it you can download the file on the archive section of this address on Saturday 15 November, 2008 from 18:00 to 19:30 pm.

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

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

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

I recently contributed in a workshop about systematic review. This kind of review, which is somehow similar to the traditional literature reviews, focuses on a specific topic to identify, evaluate, select and synthesize all high quality and relevant research evidence relevant to that topic. In systematic review we should define the inclusion and exclusion criteria to map the area according to these items. Some people think this kind of review is only useful in the medical sciences. However, I believe this is useful for any scientific field. In future posts I will write more about the advantages and disadvantages of it and how we can compare it with traditional reviews.