The Invisible Web Weblog

Dirk Lewandowski from the Department of Information Science, Heinrich-Heine-University, Düsseldorf and Philipp Mayrthe at the Institute of Library and Information Science, Humboldt-University, Berlin, discussed about the Academic Invisible Web (AIW). They define AIW as "... all databases and collections relevant to academia but not searchable by the general-purpose internet search engines." For more deatiles look attheir paper at this address .

In 2005 Hirsch suggested a new measure to assess researchers' productivity and their academic impact. The h-index is defined as "a scientist has index h if h of his/her Np papers have at least h citations each, and the other (Np-h) papers have no more than h citations each". Harzing (2007) cites Glänzel, (2006) and reports "… the advantage of the h-index is that it combines an assessment of both quantity (number of papers) and quality (impact, or citations to these papers)". Since 2005 some researchers have measured h-index in different field. For example: Oppenheim, C. (2007). "Using the h-index to rank influential British researchers in information science and librarianship." JSIST , 58(2), 297-301. However, h-index is not enough to measure the impact of someone's works in a field. In other words, though h-index is more appropriate than other methods including the total number of citations, the total number of papers and citations per paper, it h...

I would like to explore some of the questions that I have had in my mind since I began reading weblogs and developing my own blog. There are many unanswered questions about the influence of weblogs on different groups of society including LIS people (e.g. academics, practitioners, students and librarians) that need to be answered. In this study I am using a simple method. I use my own weblog to call for contribution and collect the data. In fact, the blogger collects data in blogsphere, among blogger community and about blogging. I have ten questions as follows. If you like to contribute in this study please briefly answer the following questions and email your answers to me: y.mansourian at gmail.com by the end of May 2007. If you wish to take part in this study your name will not appear in any report resulting from this study and all information you provide is completely confidential. On completion of my research, I will be pleased to send you a summary report detailing the results. ...

European Summer School in Information Retrieval ( ESSIR 2007 ) organised by University of Glasgow in cooperation with BCS-IRSG will be held 27-31 August 2007 in Glasgow. "... this 6th edition of the summer school will give participants a grounding in the core subjects of Information Retrieval (IR), such as Architecture, IR models and Evaluation as well as various important applications, such as Web search, Interactive IR, XML Retrieval, Question Answering and Multimedia Retrieval. Moreover, ESSIR 2007 has a strong focus on large-scale IR and covers some recent and trendy topics and applications in IR, such as Distributed and Peer-to-Peer IR, Web Usage and Mining, Intranet/Enterprise search, Blog search and Information Retrieval in Context ..."

Tomorrow is 21st of March which is the beginning day of Iranian New Year and the time of our national festival called Nowrouz. Happy New Year and Happy Nowrouz to you. I hope you have a successful year, full of happiness and enjoyment.

Evidence Based Library and Information Practice published its latest issue (Vol 2, No 1).

The New England Chapter of the ASIS&T is going to explore the issue of Designing Usable Interfaces on Tuesday, April 10, 2007 in Cambridge, MA. They will integrate three key approaches to user-focused design including "... (1) understand the contexts in which users actually live, work, and search to design online environments that are meaningful and help users meet their goals, (2) focus on how to reduce the intellectual labor required of users in order to improve their satisfaction with web experiences and (3) leverage the psychological effects of color, pattern and other visual cues to guide user behavior ..."