The Invisible Web Weblog

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!

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 .

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 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 disting...

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), filt...

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 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 int...

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.

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 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 behavio...

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?

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

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 ...

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 .

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 dra...

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 .

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.

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.

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 know...