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 ...

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

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

On Wednesday I attended ILISA monthly seminar at the national library which was on Knowledge Management in LIS theory and practice. We also had a guest speaker who was an expert on industrial management and he talked about different layers of KM and the evaluation criteria of KM initiatives. KM is an interdisciplinary area which is related to many subjects including LIS.

Yesterday I was in Shiraz, a great city in south of Iran, to attend the monthly ILISA meeting and also to visit the Regional Information Centre for Science & Technology . This centre is one of the pioneer institutions in providing universities and researchers with scientific information. The centre has been active in many areas of collecting, organizing and dissemination of scholarly information recourses during recent years. They develop many databases such as English abstracts of Persian papers, Persian E-Articles, Persian E-journals, Persian E-books and Persian Journal Citation Reports. They also offer document delivery cervices for the academic libraries. During this visit I met many colleagues from the ILISA branches and it was very encouraging to see all LIS progress that we can see in Iran during the current years.

The current week is the book week in Iran and some conferences, exhibitions and ceremonies are being held in different parts of the country. I have been involved in some of these activities. For example, I delivered a speech at the National Library for new LIS students form different universities in Tehran about my experience of ten years exploration in LIS. I talked about top ten reasons that I like this field; top ten areas of work for LIS students in future, top ten features of a successful librarian, top ten reasons of LIS progress in Iran and finally ten pieces of advice for them. I also made another speech today about the educational role of librarians in developing the research skills of students.

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...

Last week I had a workshop at IranDoc about Information Literacy for medical & health science students. Yesterday, I made a speech at the National Library of Iran about the first phase of my PhD to introduce the first model that I have developed during my research in Sheffield. At the end of the presentation some of the participants made interesting comments and asked some questions about the model and I addressed their comments and questions.

In the recent ILISA meeting we shared the responsibilities of different committees among the members of the board. I have been appointed as the director of the Research Committee and the assistant director of the Educational Committee. We are going to expand our research and educational activities. As a result, if you are working in any parts of the Iranian LIS community and would like to assist ILISA in its research or educational activities, please contact us.