Wired News: Searching Smarter, Not Harder Pointed out in the CIO Insight Quick Facts newsletter from November 30, 2004. (via e-mail)
Topic maps are showing up everywhere. They represent information and the relationships between pieces of information (occurrences and associations). There's an ISO standard and everything. Wired's now on board and is discussing how this could help with searching. Of course there are librarians everywhere and all over ASIS&T who work in this area.

Savvy web searchers have forced this type of relationship for years. If you're searching for china (to eat off of for turkey dinner) how do you get the right type of results? You add words that provide context. If you had a thesaurus, you'd look up the preferred term and use that. With the web, no thesaurus, so you AND a string of OR'd terms that put you in the right place (for the example, maybe noritake or fine or wedding or tableware or household???). Maybe you'd just use a more specific term that's less likely to be misunderstood (royal worcester howard gold). After you get your results back, you can scan them and then add in quotes, etc. How about adding words in another language or from another subject discipline?

Better yet, use a clustering search engine and see what topic areas it suggests. (this is cool) Why make the user think meta?  ¶ 5:34 PM| (1) comments |cites (technorati) |

  Managing references, km, 2, no 3, no... new tools? Literally at the same time I'm carrying around a new article to every meeting I attend trying to read it, I see a similar product mentioned by Steven on Library Stuff. Critical mass has been achieved so here are my comments.
First paper: Erik Wilde, "References as Knowledge Management," Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship n41 (Fall 2004), here.
Wilde does not spend too much space on this, but his basic background is that the most PKM most researchers do is to maintain a list/collection/database of references to articles they've encountered over their career. The list can be anywhere from 100-500 and is normally kept in EndNote or BibTex -- a library-centered, not user-centered utility. Cross linking and sharing is not easily accomplished (and how, you can say that again). Annotation is not easy. There's also a big disconnect in maintenance of web favorites or bookmarks and scholarly articles from databases or e-journals. His team is developing ShaRef at ETH Zurich to see if they can fix some of these issues. There's not enough in this article to demonstrate how their product succeeds. Now, as I'm looking for his D-Lib article, I learn about Bibshare. While it's great that people are really active in addressing all of this.... ack.

Second item: S.C. points to CiteULike. Theoretically it's like Furl, but it's supposed to get more metadata from e-journals and it's supposed to export to EndNote. For those 70% Wilde surveyed who don't want to combine their EndNote with their Furl, maybe something like this? It's supposed to already be working with ACM, PubMed, the Evil Empire and others... Why can't Endnote give you a bookmarklet? Why direct export or even worse, save as an RIS or tagged text file and import? The sharing part is what this system gets right... Furl creates citations, but doesn't gather enough metadata to actually allow you to cite the page : ( hm.

  ¶ 1:43 PM| (0) comments |cites (technorati) |

  Google Scholar and researchers who need it now, now, now! After this mini-conversation with Steven (see the comments). I was again reminded about one of the neat things about the publishers' native interfaces and the big-money databases. I don't know how they do it, but Compendex seems to index IEEE articles like two weeks before they're published online. This might change now that IEEE is putting pre-pubs into Xplore. I have alerts coming from Compendex, Inspec, and a few other databases and it's pretty frustrating when you know about the article but then have to wait to read it. The big databases can do this because they get direct loads from the publishers and have big groups of human indexers standing by. The data is pushed from the publisher. IOP offers feeds of new articles available online so this is extremely quick -- potentially weeks prior to publication in a journal. Science pre-pubs are anywhere from 6-10 weeks ahead of print publication.

On the other hand, Google is crawling databases made available by the publishers. Is this done at regular intervals? On Google's schedule instead of the publishers'? Will Google pick up articles as soon as they are online? How will you know?

This may not be important for an undergraduate, but for a researcher in the field, you better be able to say that you have the newest information!

  ¶ 10:02 AM| (0) comments |cites (technorati) |

  Still confused about RSS? Read Terri Vogel's easy-to-understand article in the new issue of SLA's Chemistry Division Newsletter. (v19 i2, page 4). Updated: to add the ? (because I'm not confused, but I thought someone who was reading this might be!)  ¶ 11:56 AM| (0) comments |cites (technorati) |

  Communications of the ACM: Special Issue on the Blogosphere Pointed out by John Dupuis. v47 i12 (December 2004). We haven't gotten our print edition yet, but it is in the digital library here.

Introduction Andrew Rosenbloom Pages: 30 - 33Full text available: Html(11 KB),Pdf(56 KB)

Structure and evolution of blogspace Ravi Kumar, Jasmine Novak, Prabhakar Raghavan, Andrew Tomkins Pages: 35 - 39Full text available: Html(23 KB),Pdf(169 KB)

Why we blog Bonnie A. Nardi, Diane J. Schiano, Michelle Gumbrecht, Luke Swartz Pages: 41 - 46Full text available: Html(30 KB),Pdf(135 KB) - the authors interviewed several bloggers from Stanford and asked why they blogged. Research included analyzing the blogs and in-depth interviews with the bloggers. The concept of audience is not well developed. What's needed is a longitudinal study of how blogging changes with awareness of audience, growth of audience, etc.

Semantic blogging and decentralized knowledge management Steve Cayzer Pages: 47 - 52Full text available: Html(28 KB),Pdf(148 KB)

We are looking for a system capable of aggregating, annotating, indexing, and searching a community's snippets. The challenges we would face in developing such a system include:

• Ease of use and capture.
  
• Decentralized aggregation.
  
• Distributed knowledge.
  
• Flexible data model.
  
• Inferencing.

Exactly. Also: "Blogging's greatest benefit is social, not technological" and "embedding Semantic Web technology within a blogging framework" -- I've seen this somewhere before? I think it was a British org, though, not HP or Stanford? Is it too late to claim that's what I meant by automatically assigned metadata? I want my semantic blog to work like EndNote and allow me to cite while I write, can it do that?

How blogging software reshapes the online community Rebecca Blood Pages: 53 - 55Full text available: Html(15 KB),Pdf(62 KB)

Democracy and filtering Cass R. Sunstein Pages: 57 - 59Full text available: Html(14 KB),Pdf(56 KB)

updated after reading some of the articles...
  ¶ 9:26 AM| (0) comments |cites (technorati) |

  Other bloggers who blogged ASIS&T

• Jon Jablonski of Oregon had a nice write-up on JC Herz's plenary.
• Dave Weinberger (of SocialText?) blogged a v. v. short commentary. Hmm. Some of what he says kind of goes along with the tension between librarians and new cs/dot com guys who think they invented cataloging, classification, IR, and indexing, but we won't go there
• J (aka Jessica Baumgart) blogs our session, the opening reception, and other sessions she hit.
• Metametametadata (cool name, Robert Wolfe?) blogged the Herz plenary, the Berners-Lee plenary and our session. (Yes, WE of all people needed wireless in our room!!! Talking about connections while totally disconnected is ironic, no?)

This list is way shorter than the list of people who blogged CIL, IL, SLA... why is that? Are Sunir and D.W. right that we're that far behind the times? Are there still some Canadians and Scandinavians who haven't gotten home yet?

  ¶ 1:42 PM| (0) comments |cites (technorati) |

  The Publishers Weekly review of Biz Stone's new book Is funny. I'm always late in reading these because I'm on the print distribution list, but here's a little quote:

...typical of Stone's approach: facts may be interesting enough on
their own, buy why not dress them up with snazzy distortions?

It's in v.251 n44 (November 1, 2004): 54-5. IOW like the first Stone blog book, not useful.
  ¶ 1:28 PM| (0) comments |cites (technorati) |

  Early/Summary Posts from ASIST: Wednesday Whew. Almost there.

Communication and Interaction Behavior

• Socio-Technical Interaction Networks as a Tool for Understanding Digital Libraries
  Howard Rosenbaum and KyoungHee Joung
  They studied the successful marketing activies of the American Memory Project of the Library of Congress as "enrollment" activities in a socio-technical interaction network. There were three levels. Primary is bringing potential users to DC to the library. Secondary is using net technologies like chat and e-mail to train users. Tertiary is information dissemination about the other two. Rosenbaum said that this is the "social informatics approach." My question, and it may have not been an appropriate one, is how this approach better informs practice than looking at these activities from marketing theory/approaches. Another thing is: why does it matter that this was a digital library? Rosenbaum's answer was that they were in an early stage and they weren't ready to apply the model yet. huh.


• A Case Study of Communication Channels in a Graduate Program
  Shen-Cheng Huang, Chao-Hsiu Chen, and Hsin-Liang Chen
  This was a very practical and interesting study. They looked at the library school list serv and found several ways to improve communications to the students. CLIS just changed some things about their list servs that addresses these exact issues -- did they have an advanced copy of the paper? One of the suggestions was to use a standard title for anouncements from the school. The PAM list does this, you start your subject with MATH ASTRO PHYS, etc. Anyway, probably a worthwhile read for listserv admins.


• Blogarians - A New Breed of Librarians
  Judit Bar-Ilan
  Well, she freely admits that she didn't know anything about blogs before she started this. She did content analysis on a lot of librarian blogs. While I don't agree that she achieves all she promises in her abstract, she does make a few nice points. For one thing, she basically says we're obligated to blog because of the 1992 ASIST Professional Guidelines! She ends by saying that there isn't a need for more blogs, but we need to get more people reading the blogs.

Journal Performance and Impact

The moderator did a sort of disservice to this session. She kept hurrying the presenters along, disallowed questions, then spent 5 minutes giving little anecdotes to introduce the next speaker. argh! Plus, all the slides were portrait instead of landscape so they were really tiny to read. I guess 4 speakers in one session is too much.

• Rank-Normalized Impact Factor
  Alexander Pudovkin and Eugene Garfield
  Very interesting. They made the point that comparing impact factors of journals in one field to journals in another is like comparing apples and oranges. Clinical neurologists may do a lot more citing, for example, than say physicists - so their journals will automatically have higher factors. They cited several attempts to normalize the impact factors that were less than totally successful. Their method seems to do a lot better.


• An Integrated Approach for the Analysis of Factors Affecting Journal Citation Impact in Clinical Neurology
  Weiping Yue and Concepcion S. Wilson.
  Ms. Yue was really rushed through her presentation, but it seemed to describe a lot more comprehensive model for analyzing the journal impact. They are looking specifically at what external factors affect impact. Some of these factors are accessibility (includes language and subscription rates), internationality, perceived quality. Her inputs are all complex constructs instead of simplistic numbers. I don't know if it's the complexity or just her presentation, but I kind of liked this paper and trust the presenter.


• Can Web Citations Be a Measure of Impact?
  Liwen Vaughan and Debora Shaw
  In direct contrast to the previous speaker, this speaker said something right off the bat that I know to be untrue, so I pretty much discounted her entire talk. It's funny that way in this conference... was I supposed to read the papers first so I didn't misunderstand from the talks?


• Mapping the Chinese Science Citation Database
  Loet Leydesdorff and Jin Bihui
  I didn't even know there was a Chinese Science Citation Database... instead of spending a lot of time getting information from CiteSeer, et al, they should buy rights to this database and encorporate it into WoS. Like right away because China is surpassing most of the European countries in scientific output and they're mostly publishing in the 6k Chinese journals (I never knew there were so many). Besides the usual connections between journals, the authors found many geographic and institutional connections. The presenter said that the journals have a different place in Chinese institutions. To look for: Jin, B & Wang, B "Chinese Citation Database: Its Construction and Applicaton" Scientometrics v45 n2 (1999): 325-332.

Access to Multiple Library Resources

• Library Portals: The Impact of the Library Information Environment on Information Seeking Success
  Brian Detlor and Vivian Lewis
  It's actually kind of an interesting story. Detlor had a class of 8 grad students he tasked with evaluating the library's portal -- and they weren't MLS students, either. Lewis is a librarian. They found (again) that librarians use too much jargon and library terms, that library pages are too much about the library and not enough about the patron, and that relying on LCSHes isn't user friendly. I wanted to ask, but forgot, about the NCSU math resource guides that map the professor-speak to LCSH terms. I wonder if they are aware of them?


• Design, Development and Implementation of a Texas Library Directory Database
  Irene Lopatovska, Fatih Oguz, and William Moen
  A very neat project for a customer of public and academic libraries in Texas can login, get a branded page for their local library, and can have access to all the appropriate databases. I was a bit concerned that it automatically searches across the OPAC and the Ebsco databases because I find that even very sophisticated users don't understand the difference between searching to gain physical access to the information vs. searching the information. This question was taken as an attack on the students, so I quickly shut up and then apologized later. I found out that these students didn't get to participate in the evaluation, so they don't know if this feature was a problem or not.


• Evaluation of a State-wide Collaborative Chat-Based Reference Service
  Jeffrey Pomerantz and Chuck McClure
  Interesting. He also said that they are trying to develop a database to do state to state comparisons. CLIS had some sort of deal they were trying to iron out with LSSI, but since I haven't heard any more about that I'll assume that fell through.

Beyond the Sandbox: Wikis and Blogs That Get Work Done
Cool title, cool presentation.

• Cameron Marlow of Blogdex. He spoke a little more about his paper comparing linking to someone with blogrolling someone. He and Shirky and a couple of others are the ones really looking at blogs in the US.


• Sunir Shah of Meatball Wiki and recently acquired (yes, I get it, and no, k-workers don't want to be known as plug-and-play resources, but as real people, individuals even) by Socialtext. Sunir had some very interesting things to say but a lot of us had trouble hearing in the back. I think one of his main points was that academe went from a long oral tradition over thousands of years to a print-based one in a few decades. Wikis take moves it back toward an interactive flow. He covered the serials crisis - as if we need that - and talked about how wikis can really be an great place for a group to develop a paper, get all the bugs worked out, let it go through peer review in the open prior to submission to a real open access or other journal. The only problem with this is for journals that are reluctant to have their materials published on the net months prior to submission (don't you have to say that your paper hasn't been published anywhere else when you submit?).

Reception

This reception was the exception: free food and liquor from a for-profit publisher. Nice conversations with S.S., J.J., W.J., N.M. and others. Look what happens when you get two former Navy women together!  ¶ 10:04 PM| (1) comments |cites (technorati) |

  My Slides on PKM from ASIST I still haven't nailed down a place to put the actual slides, so I html'ed them (non-trivial activity) and posted that on our collaborative blog.
eta: http://asistkblogpanel.blogspot.com/2004/11/christinas-slides-in-outline-form.html    ¶ 11:44 AM| (0) comments |cites (technorati) |

  Early Posts from ASIST: Tuesday Even though these are late, I'm still keeping with the early convention in the title. Basically, that's to indicate that these are more summary-type than deep analysis. Also, all this fades with time so I'm running against the clock in posting before it disappears completely. Never again will I attend a conference without some sort of computer.

I left after the first speaker in the first session so I could meet with the people presenting with me at 10:30.

Studying Scientific Collaboration, Part 1: Methodology for Investigating Collaboration
Henry Small from ISI spoke about something. At this point I remember him talking about the trend of more authors per article, all professionals who are members of a project being automatically listed as co-authors, increased internationality of co-authorship... he said eventually every physicist would be an author of every paper...

Blogs for KM and Information Dissemination
There's more that you'll ever want to know about this on the appropriate blog. I'll also continue to post more information on the subject there.

Awards Luncheon
I liked the chicken. Luckily Dr. Soergel held a seat for me because it was packed. I learned from the first reception not to get between these people and their food!

Managing Information from Scientific Research Projects

• Suzanne Cristina from UTC spoke about some of the efforts they've made to have lessons learned, etc., available to their staff. Very KM, very 90s but it's working for them.
  
• Jayne Dutra from JPL (a cool place with some of the same interests as I've got) spoke about developing the NASA taxonomy. You have to hand it to her and her team because they really took the user's needs into account. They specifically built it to be flexible and also just used the words that the subject matter experts recommended.

-- after that I ran over to see the very cool Maryland project --
Design for Helping Users
Bringing Together Children and Books: An Initial Descriptive Study of Children's Book Searching and Selection Behavior in a Digital Library
Kara Reuter and Allison Druin
When I first heard about the ICDL a couple of years ago, I spent way too much time flipping through the books. This is really a neat project. Kara was talking about when they actually went to a suburban Maryland school and interviewed and watched the kids use the ICDL. They found that the younger children opened every book, while the older children were better able to see from the metadata if they had what they wanted. Also, the kids typically did a lot of searching for Harry Potter, but that's not surprising. The children all enjoyed looking at books written in unfamiliar languages -- that's pretty cool. They also did a lot of diffuse searching -- flipping backward and forward and clicking on things. I wish I knew this was typical behavior before when I was trying to "help" the children at the public library. I guess it's just normal.

Methodologies for User Studies

• Survey of Learner's Knowledge Structures
  Peiling Wang, Stephen Bales, Jason Teiger, and Yan Zhang
  She basically talked about knowledge maps and trying to design instruments to adequately measure student's understanding of the relationships between concepts. To me it came across as an infinitely more painful "always, sometimes, never" test. There were drop down boxes between each pair of terms and the student had to pick which term described the relationship - it could then be mapped by the system. I'm not sure I actually got it, but I am glad I never had to take any tests like that!
  
• Measuring the Affective Information Environment of Web Searchers
  Diane Nahl
  It's all about anxiety, uncertainty, optimism. People do better on searches when they're optimistic. There's a lot more to her model. I hope it's used to inform design.
  
• Effect of Taks on Time Spent Reading as an Implicit Measure of Interest
  Melanie Kellar, Carolyn Watters, Jack Duffy and Michael Shepherd
  I didn't really take any notes on this, but it's pretty complicated. Their subjects had to judge relevance of a newswire article, answer short and more descriptive questions with other articles. I think with this, if you're in a cluttered environment, it would really show interest if you stopped everything and kept or read the article -- but that's near to impossible to study. More still needs to be done here to nail this down.
  

Missed SIG CON but had a lovely dinner.  ¶ 3:47 PM| (0) comments |cites (technorati) |

  TCS: Tech Central Station - The Faith-Based Encyclopedia Someone at the ASIS&T session on wikis and blogs asked about this article. Not to belabor a point, just providing access.

As most thoughtful adults will immediately recognize, this article is inflammatory and very biased. Note this quote:

The user who visits Wikipedia to learn about some subject, to confirm some matter of fact, is rather in the position of a visitor to a public restroom. It may be obviously dirty, so that he knows to exercise great care, or it may seem fairly clean, so that he may be lulled into a false sense of security. What he certainly does not know is who has used the facilities before him.

Perhaps to be expected from Britannica.
update: I forgot to say where I got this. I was reminded by CHMINF-L.
  ¶ 1:45 PM| (0) comments |cites (technorati) |

  Google Scholar This, no doubt, is being discussed everywhere online. I hope to do some testing and report back.

Update 11/19: KK points out this Nature article on UMCLIS-L
Note this interesting point I haven't seen elsewhere...

Google Scholar has a subversive feature, however. Each hit also links to all the free versions of the article it has found saved on other sites, for example on personal home pages, elsewhere on the Internet.

If that's true, then this really could be important.  ¶ 1:38 PM| (0) comments |cites (technorati) |

  Early Posts from ASIST: Monday updated 11/18 to correct some typos
Web Searching Behavior (papers)

• Compared student perceptions of searching the OPAC with searching the web (Karl V. Fast, D Grant Campbell) -- they did recognize that the OPAC was a closed set with strict indexing that provided access to authoritative documents (but usually not the answer) and the web is more friendly, takes more time to judge appropriateness of resources, and may provide the actual answer. Touched briefly on socializing googlizing the OPAC (which doesn't really work since in most cases the structure doesn't support searching that way.
  
• Keeping and re-finding information on the web (Jones). This was really just more about what we learned about in the CE course.
  
• Information Task Switching and Multitasking Web Search. (Amanda Spink, Minsoo Park, Bernard J. Jansen) This is very interesting and needs to be compared/contrasted with berrypicking and also Foster's non-linear. She first compared dual tasking (doing two things at the same time) with multi-tasking (switching back and forth between tasks). She gave examples of someone starting out searching for gardening information and then moved to searching for information on prozac prescription for children. So unlike berrypicking where it's one search that's redirected upon happening on information -- this is an entirely new search that is conducted almost at the same time.
  To look at: Spink, A. "Multitasking information behavior and information task switching: An exploratory study." Journal of Documentation, 60(4)(2004): 336-51. DOI: 10.1108/00220410410548126.

Plenary Session: Sir Tim Berners-Lee
His bio, although anyone reading this probably knows who he is.
Berners-Lee is a visionary who dreams up things that would make our life easier/better, then works to make them happen. As such, I'm not sure there's anything of immediate impact to take from his talk, but I do have some observations. First, he talks about automatically recognizing common fields and recognizing them across programs and tools. For example, your digital camera automatically marks the time the picture was taken, why can't those pictures be integrated into your calendar (Gary Marchionini later says that GPS will be integrated into the metadata tags digital cameras add so that you can find your pictures by location). Second, he says that all types of items should eventually have URIs (indicators, not locations) -- books, chemicals, people, etc. To me, this doesn't really make sense. I get where he's going, but obviously Chem Abstracts has a much better handle on all the chemicals than any start-up organization would have now (although not perfect). Likewise, we have several different identifying numbers for books: ISBN, ASIN, LOC catalog number, OCLC number, etc. Each of them stands for one incarnation. Adding a new URI doesn't make sense. For people -- some of this was tried with SSNs, and we all know what happened with that. How I see this working is more like for DOIs. There's a resolver/thesaurus/crosswalk thingy that takes you to what you want when you enter any of the names for the item. It exists for chemicals. He said more, but for right now... I did mention that the standard in the blogosphere was to identify books by their Amazon URL -- he seemed to agree, but once again, this happened because 1) it's easy 2) the record that's returned is rich 3) the record points to other versions of the same book (editions, audio tapes, etc). OCLC, the ISBN people, LOC don't have anything near this cool -- why doesn't the find in a library URL have the ISBN OR OCLC number obviously in it? Why can you reconstruct the "find in a library" URL if you know the book's OCLCN or ISBN like you can with some scientific publishers who use the ISSN in the URL (is that Open URL? I'm not sure).

Why Can't Johnny File?
Discusses end user efforts to organize their personal information. Can indexing, IR, classification, LIS, etc., help them?
This was a real who's who panel: Kulthau, Bates, Jones (mentioned above), Marchionini, Mai
More on this later.

User-Based Relevance

• Meng Yang - Exploring Users' Video Relevance Criteria. She's still just starting with this, but it promises to be an interesting dissertation. Talked about video surrogates (trailers, tables of contents on DVDs, bibliographic indexing, story boards) and how users determine if videos are relevant. She broke it down into three categories which I've already forgotten. The first was just what you'd find for books, the second was for visual stuff, the third was ? Look for interesting things from her.
• Xiaoli Huang - Relevance Judges' Understanding of Topical Relevance Types... Very interesting talk really breaking town topical relevance. This was just the results of the exploratory study, so more will be coming. Most people think of topic relevance as binary: it is or isn't directly "on topic." She discussed many other ways it could be topically relevant.
• Bin Bai - this talk had some real big issues. I'll leave it at that.

I'm off now to the Alumni Reception! Let's Go Maryland!

  ¶ 6:14 PM| (0) comments |cites (technorati) |

  Early Posts from ASIS&T: Sunday While I would like to add thoughtful commentary and analysis -- I don't have much time so I'll just put some quick observations down. Hopefully there will be time for more complete coverage when I'm back to being fully connected (I'm sitting in the lovely Providence Library now)

CE Session: Personal Information Management in Theory and Practice
by William Jones (and Harry Bruce who is in Washington, getting over Pneumonia)
From University of Washington Information School, Keeping Found Things Found Project.

Dr. Jones is a specialist in Cognitive Psychology, so he really had a different point of view.

Plenary Session: JC Herz (homepage? www.joysticknation.com requires login?)
I was a bit concerned that she would cover some of the really trite things we hear (technology x will save the world...), but she was actually really cool. She talked about social networks, blogs, wikis, a-lists/power law, group as user, community formed around the sims...

E-Science: The New Environment for Scientific and Technical Information Managment

• Harnessing grid computing to do science
• How EPA is doing portals for science (and not, in any way, using their libraries/librarians)
• How the JISC just unveiled a new project for ?

Welcome Reception, SIG Rush
Weak food. No actual SIG representatives to try to recruit us for their SIGs!

  ¶ 5:41 PM| (0) comments |cites (technorati) |

  ASIST K-blog Panel Collaborative Blog Jessica, Garrett, Kris and I are now making our blog public so that the panel attendees can see our links. Feel free to check it out. Even better, if you're attending ASIST in Providence, RI, come to our session. It's on Tuesday, November 16 at 10:30.  ¶ 5:40 PM| (0) comments |cites (technorati) |

  Foster: A Nonlinear Model of Information-Seeking Behavior Allen Foster. “A nonlinear model of information-seeking behavior” JASIST v55 n3 (Febrary 1, 2004): 228-237. DOI: 10.1002/asi.10359

This article is so cool. I still haven't finished the Library Trends special issue (v45 i2, Fall 96) on interdisciplinary work, but this article goes along with that. Foster proposes a model for interdisciplinary researchers that is not strictly chronological... moving along in stages as the standard ISPs do.

The relationship of behaviors was described interms of concurrent, continuous, cumulative and looped cycles occurring throughout a research project... there was...a sense of nonsequential behavior in which any behavior could conceivably lead to any other.

It seems to better describe people at work as it briefly mentions the impact of social networks, multiple projects going on at the same time, and never-ending processes.
  ¶ 4:03 PM| (1) comments |cites (technorati) |

  Forecast: Blogging will be light as I prepare for ASIST I'll be presenting at the ASIST conference in a little over the week and I have some large research projects going meantime so posting will continue to be light until the 4th week of November.  ¶ 8:59 AM| (0) comments |cites (technorati) |

  Another article on searching/mining blogs in libraries Pointed out on Library Stuff.

Paul J. Moorman, "Mining Information Gold in the Blogosphere: How to use Web logs as reliable research tools." AALL Spectrum. (November 2004): 14-6.

Moorman quotes a chunk of my earlier article and a lot of what Steven Cohen's been saying for a couple of years. What's nice about this article is his balanced treatment of the whole genre (for lack of a better term). He talks of detractors and supporters, fool's paradise vs. prestige and high quality writing... Here's a nice quote:

But if you take a closer look at the arguments for both blog-detractors and blog-supporters, you will find that they really aren’t that far apart. Blogs can be both trivial and profound, and these traits are evident even in the best blogs.(p.14)

  ¶ 11:02 AM| (0) comments |cites (technorati) |

  IEEE to Cease Publicaton of Conference Proceedings in Print in 2006 I haven't seen this elsewhere, so I'll assume it's new. After 2005, IEEE Conference Proceedings will be electronic only. The transactions and magazines will still be both print and electronic. Good news for those of us with space issues and aisles after aisles of blue volumes (now all white and paperback, but we'll be ditching some of the old).  ¶ 1:18 PM| (1) comments |cites (technorati) |