The Invisible Web Weblog

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 ...

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Today morning I ran a workshop for a group of students from various disciplines, about the basic hints to write a thesis. The workshop was held as part of the LIS activities in conjunction with the Tehran International Book Fair. Two brief reports of the workshop are accessible on IBNA and LISNA . Moreover, the PowerPoint file and the workshop handout will be freely available on ILISA website soon. However, if you need these files before that time, please email me.

I had another workshop on "Academic Writing" on last Thursday (04/02/10). After the workshop, I thought it would be a good idea to make a list of FAQs (Frequently Asked Questions) on this topic and upload it on a website. Although I have prepared a handout which includes all the necessary details, it also would be very handy for answering common questions. So, I might make such list in the near future. Report Writing FAQ , is an example of what I mean, and I found it on the web. Also there is another example on the Open University website about essay writing entitled “ Top 10 Essay Writing Tips ”. Finally, Paper Writing FAQ Sheet is another example of this type of FAQs.

Yesterday I had a workshop on “Time Management and Study Skills” for LIS students at TMU. It was my first experience of running a workshop on this topic, and I found it very interesting. The participants showed their great interest and we had a lot to talk about. In particular, as the topic is related to everyone’s everyday life, they actively participated in the discussions. Hopefully, we all can improve our Time Management and our Study Skills!

Personal Information Management Workshop 2009 will take place in November 7-8, 2009, in Vancouver. According to the workshop's website : “Personal information management (PIM) is the practice and study of the activities people perform to acquire, organize, maintain, and retrieve information for everyday use. PIM is a growing area of interest as we all strive for better use of our limited personal resources of time, money, and energy, as well as greater workplace efficiency and productivity. Good research on the topic is being done in several disciplines, including human-computer interaction, database management, information retrieval, and artificial intelligence. This workshop will continue momentum towards building a community of researchers doing PIM-related research.”

One of the workshops at the 2009 ASIS&T Annual Meeting, is called "The Soft Skills for Academic Library Web Project Managers". According to their announcement : “This workshop is focused on communication, teamwork, and usability for web managers, programmers, technical staff and anyone who may be called upon to manage a web project within the library environment. The main topics include: how to lead a project team, how to design an organizational communication plan, how to involve administrators and others in leadership, how to get constructive input from colleagues, how to evaluate the success of your project management skills.

While I was in Reading to deliver my presentation to the LTEA 2009 Conference, I also attended four useful workshops including: 1. Understanding Digital Identity, run by Patrick Parslow and Sarah Fleming from University of Reading. 2. Designing and Assessing Inquiry Based Learning, run by Phil Levy, CiLASS, from University of Sheffield. 3. Three Dimensions of Collaborative Learning: the PEERS Project at University College Maastricht, run by Oscar van den Wijngaard & Wilfred van Dellen from University College Maastricht. 4. Effective Feedback, by professor Phil Race.

Two weeks ago I delivered a workshop on academic writing for a group of researchers in education at the Mazandaran University. The workshop was held in conjunction with the eighth annual conference of the Iranian Curriculum Studies Association . At the last day of the conference, I also made a speech about the invisible web for the members of the ICT SIG of the association. In general, it was a great chance for me to meet people from other areas and discuss my interdisciplinary interests with them.

I was in Kerman recently to attend a conference on medical librarianship and also to run a workshop about "Information Literacy Skills for Medical Students". A number of librarians from different medical libraries attended the workshop. I focused on the importance of IL in medicine and how we can teach medical students to enhance their IL skills. Moreover, we reviewed a number of medical databases and specialized search tools in life sciences.

Today morning I delivered a speech in a meeting held by the Iranian Psychology Association. My speech was about the implications and implementations of Grounded Theory (GT) in social science research. Almost all of the participants in the meeting were academic staff and postgraduate students form different psychology departments. I firstly introduced GT and briefly mentioned its history. Then I illustrated the meaning of GT as an inductive and exploratory approach in research and its values as a systematic research methodology to explore little understood phenomena. I also explained my own experience of using GT in my PhD research and what I have learned by implementation of this methodology. Moreover, I referred to the possible ways which enable researchers to enhance the credibility of their findings based on GT method. The participants' comments on my presentation were very useful for me to hear the ideas of a number of researchers who mainly came from quantitative camp. This is...

I just came back home from a workshop that I did run for a group of faculty members of universities about how to enhance their writing skills in English to be more successful in publishing papers in academic journals. It was a great opportunity for me to discuss about academic writing with a number of fellow researchers. Most of them were more experienced than me in academia and I was lucky to be among them. My next semester begins on next Saturday and I am going to teach five days per week at two universities! This can be a bit tiring and I have already felt exhausted when I think about it! Although teaching is so rewarding, it may stop one from following his research interests as this is very energy consuming to deliver lectures and requires a lot of time to prepare lecture notes. I wish I could be a PhD student once again to have enough time to explore a subject in great detail for a long time. If someone can sponsor me to do another PhD in an area in my research interests I am happ...

I had a joint workshop for ILISA at the National Library of Iran on last Friday from 9:00 am to 5 pm. The workshop was about the basics of qualitative research in general and Grounded Theory in particular as an example of inductive qualitative methodology. Dr. Ebrahim Afshar and I were the teachers of the workshop and 57 academic librarians and LIS students from different parts of the country attended there. We deliberately employed an unplanned method to teach the principles of qualitative research and Grounded Theory to run the workshop based on an intuitive development of the discussions with participants and it really worked. Dr. Afshar and I had not arranged the details of the topics and slides before the workshop. In fact, we employed an exploratory approach and tried to explain the pivotal aspects of Grounded Theory. I explained real examples of my PhD research to show how we can employ this methodology in practice. During the last eight months I have had several workshops on di...

I did run a workshop about essential skills to develop and publish research papers in academic journals for some of the faculty members from different universities. I developed the outline of the workshop mainly based on my personal experience in academic writing. We focused on different aspects of scholar writing including motivations and different kinds of writing, essential elements of a good paper and how to enhance the quality and acceptability of our paper. At the end we concluded that a well-written academic paper should possess 4C and it should be Clear, Coherent, Consistent and Concise.

PIM 2008 (Personal Information Management) will take place in April 5 & 6, 2008 in Florence, Italy. PIM is one of my favourite areas. The workshop's website defines this area as "… PIM is the practice and study of the activities people perform to acquire, organize, maintain, and retrieve information for everyday use. PIM is a growing area of interest as we all strive for better use of our limited personal resources of time, money, and energy, as well as greater workplace efficiency and productivity. Good research on the topic is being done in several disciplines, including human-computer interaction, database management, information retrieval, and artificial intelligence." The topics covered by this workshop include (1) Understanding PIM to understand how people manage their personal information beyond their desktop, how they find and re-find information, how they keep and organize information and methods and methodologies of PIM fieldwork: How do we study PIM? (2) ...

This is my first summer after the completion of my PhD with less work and more free time. However, I am not totally on leave and do some educational activities. For example, I ran a one-day workshop at Astan Quds library on Tuesday 31 July. The workshop's topic was about my main research interest, the invisible web and information seeking behaviour on the web. I explored the differences between the literature-based definition of the invisible web and what I mean by this phenomenon based on my PhD research. More than thirty members of the library staff participated in the workshop. Some of the comments that I received about the model of cognitive invisibility (published in 2006 in JDOC vol. 62, issue 5) were very useful to view the model from the perspective of some experienced librarians. I tried to explain the practical implications of the model in theory, policy and practice. I also had a speech today for a group of the librarians who work in the cultural centres. It was about th...