(International Council for Scientific and Technical Information) Annual Conference 2010 will take place for the first time in Helsinki, Finland, on June 10 and 11, 2010. From Information to Innovation has been chosen as the main theme of the conference and will highlight the significance of information as the enabler and catalyst for scientific, technical and business developments and point to to elements of success in building the future. There are three inspiring sub-themes:
Information as the lifeblood of research and innovation - Finnish cases
Intelligent information solutions and services
Creating the future - towards the global innovation economy
This report points out a major issue for researchers: it is often easy to FIND the content they need (through Web of Science or Google or PubMed) but it is difficult to ACCESS it. "The content is not available online (either through failure to be digitised or lack of licence purchasing) and licences for
online content are seen to be too complex and sometimes restrictive of access for non-members of institutions; and institutions lack the technical and administrative capacity to overcome these issues."
Abstract: "UK public policy makers have a growing interest in collaborative research, where academics work with public, private or third sector partners on a joint project which supports the partner's aims. This paper reports on the findings of five case studies, looking at how information is sourced, managed, used and shared within collaborative research projects. It finds that researchers within collaborative projects have similar information management issues as are known to exist within academia more broadly, but that the specific conditions which govern research collaborations mean that interventions to improve or support information management must be carefully tailored."
Bibliometric and usage-based analyses and tools highlight the value of information about scholarship contained within the network of authors, articles and usage data. Less progress has been made on populating and using the author side of this network than the article side, in part because of the difficulty of unambiguously identifying authors. I briefly review a sample of author identifier schemes, and consider use in scholarly repositories. I then describe preliminary work at arXiv to implement public author identifiers, services based on them, and plans to make this information
GKEN is about the changing role and nature of information in society as a whole. Prof. Weller's work is a great introduction to 'information history' understood in a way similar to GKEN's mission.
"As more sources for citation information have become available - even many scholarly databases today offering cited reference data - the need to identify, access and manage these resources is becoming acute. Information professionals need to become more proactive in their strategies to support these applications and users. .."
provides access to a comprehehsive set of software packages easing the exploration, modification, comparison, and extension of data mining and information visualization algorithms. Diverse software packages were bundled into learning modules. Access to a large-scale data repository, extensive compute resources, and a growing set of references are provided as well. It is our hope that the community will adopt this resource to foster Information Visualization education and research.
This collaborative research project will be composed of two separate, but linked, analyses. It will identify and examine information-related support services throughout the lifecycle of the research process.
The project's goal is to discover researchers' needs and desires in a small sample of UK and US universities and to identify the significant patterns, intersections, gaps and issues from researchers' points of view, whatever the source of such services. This study will document the nature and scope of research support services, providing examples of good practice, recommending areas where new practice might emerge, and identifying possible areas and scope for collaboration within and between institutions
"The information science field of webometrics is "the study of the quantitative aspects of the construction and use of information resources, structures and technologies on the web drawing on bibliometric and informetric approaches" [1] or, more generally, "the study of web-based content with primarily quantitative methods for social science research goals using techniques that are not specific to one field of study"[2]."
A Pew presentation documents the ubiquity of mobile technology and social networking and how libraries can use it to their advantage and even rethink their focus (thanks to Garrett Eastman). Useful charts showing the penetration of mobile and broadband internationally, together with any data on teens and adults information behavior.
OpenAccess Statistics: Alternative Impact Measures for Open Access documents? An examination how to generate interoperable usage information from distributed Open Access services
"The 116-page report represents a 2-year effort with the sponsorship and support of the U.S. National Science Foundation, The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Library of Congress (LC), the U.K. Joint Information Systems Committee, the Electronic Records Archives Program of the National Archives and Records Administration, and the Council on Library and Information Resources. On April 1, the Task Force will hold a symposium in Washington, D.C., followed by another on May 6 in the U.K." _Barbara Quint, InformationToday
"A Data Curation Profile is a resource for Library and Information Science professionals, Archivists, IT professionals, Data Managers, and others who want information about the specific data generated and used in research areas and sub-disciplines that may be published, shared, and preserved for re-use."
The authors note that licenses need to allow libraries to: make new uses of the licensed content, share information with peers about licensing terms, and rest assured that licensed content will be available in the future.
The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill School of Information and Library Science has released Research Data Stewardship at UNC: Recommendations for Scholarly Practice and Leadership.