Hello,

Last week (4-5 June), the Faculty of Library and Information Science at the University of Barcelona organized the III International Seminar on LIS Education and Research (LIS-ER) during the celebration of its centenary (1915-2015).

The Seminar had the aims to bring together representatives from leading European and American LIS schools to “discuss together the challenges faced by our field and to take a major step forward in our shared analysis and in our strategic planning”.

We could hear Blaise Cronin speaking about "A field in flux", Cristóbal Urbano exposing “Some research questions to frame a European Union overview on LIS research” and Roderic Guigó explaining “What scientists do with research data?".

We also could enjoy of several round tables focused on discussing the LIS education in Europe and in America, challenges of LIS research and the future of the LIS academic journals.

Special mention to the 40 posters what were presented and exhibited, and that attracted great interest from attendees. During the Seminar attendees can vote to the best formal presentation and the best content, that respectively were 10 things to consider in doing an internship in LIS of Carolina Rozo Higuera and Challenges to adapt library services to Horizon 2020 of Beatriz Benítez-Juan and Consol Garcia-Gómez.

Enjoy it!

Andreu Sulé

University of Barcelona

Hello,

Today I want to point out the Marshall Breeding’s white paper The Future of Library Resource Discovery, published by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) at February 2015.

Marshall Breeding is today one of the most important library consultant, and all that he writes is always interesting. He is the creator and editor of Library Technology Guides, author of the Systems Librarian column that appears monthly in Computers in Libraries, and responsible of the essential annual publication Library Systems Report.

In this new report, Breeding analyzes the tools and technologies that facilitate the discovery of and access to the resources for the communities that they serve. To do it, the author opens the report with an overview of the current discovery environment, followed by the “descriptions of how these technologies, methodologies, and products may be able to adapt to potential future change”. Breeding devotes last sections to take a look to the future, especially on those issues related to linked data.

The paper wants to be a second step after the Open Discovery Initiative: Promoting Transparency in Discovery and includes short term recommendations as well as longer-term that investigate “how evolving technologies such as open linked data can be operationalized”.

Enjoy it!

Andreu Sulé

University of Barcelona

Hello,

A pool of Google’s members has published a very interesting paper entitled Knowledge-Based Trust: Estimating the Trustworthiness of Web Sources that proposes a new algorithm to calculate the ranking of web pages. They propose to move from exogenous signals to endogenous signals, that is, to replace popularity criteria with correctness information criteria. But, how to know the facts contained in a web page are trustworthy? Authors expose a methodology that begins with the automatic extraction of the facts from each source. Then, the trustworthy of these facts is evaluated “by using joint inference in a novel multi-layer probabilistic model”.  They call this trustworthiness score Knowledge-Based Trust (KBT).

Does it work? That seems, because the paper shows as manual evaluation confirms the effectiveness of the method applied to a database of 2.8B facts extracted from 119M web pages.

Will be the KBT the web ranking of the future?

Enjoy it!

Andreu Sulé

University of Barcelona

Hello,

Today I would like to share with you a very interesting collaborative effort: the Open Data Day. This event, held on 21th February 2015, has a main goal “to show support for and encourage the adoption open data policies by the world's local, regional and national governments”. During this day, thousands volunteers from hundreds cities around the world joined their efforts “to write applications, liberate data, create visualizations and publish analyses using open public data”.

Anyone could organize a local hackathon and to hack on anything that involves open data. The only demand was that each city’s hackathon shared its project with at least one other city as a way to promote the collaboration.

If you are interested on open data and you want to participate with this project in your city, in this map or in this wiki page you can look for if some people was working in your city during the Open Data Day.

Enjoy it!

Andreu Sulé

University of Barcelona

Hello,

The Instituto Cervantes hosted at 11^th December 2014 the conference Big data and libraries: converting data into knowledge. The meeting aimed to shed light on this new professional field and role playing from the library environment and documentary massive data processing, in order to identify new opportunities untapped.

Organizers have had the excellent initiative to make accessible all talk videos, in addition of an interview to each speaker and their presentation. There, you can find the Big data dealt with several point of views:  computer science (Mateo Valero); privacy and data protection (Judith González); technology (Óscar Méndez);  retrieval of information (Jorge Serrano); etc.

Sincerely, some of these talks show us a very enthusiastic future, but others make my hair stand on end. They figure a world that remembers me the famous George Orwell’s book “1984”. Scary!

Enjoy it!

Andreu Sulé

University of Barcelona

Hello!

There are not many LIS educational centres that can say that they have 100 years of history. A century training the librarians of the future is not an easy matter in a profession so exposed to social, economic and technological challenges. This is the reason I am very pleased to communicate the celebration of the century of the Facultat de Biblioteconomia I Documentació (School of Library and Information Science) de la Universitat de Barcelona, Spain.
The School was founded in 1915 and is the second oldest LIS School in Europe and currently the oldest integrated into a University. The aim of the School, initially only for women, was to educate the librarians responsible for the public library network planned by the Catalan government and built from 1918 onwards, inspired by the British and North American library systems.

Two of the main activities will be the exhibition BiblioTec: a century of studies and library profession, 1915-2015 and the III International Seminar on LIS Education and Research (LIS-ER). The exhibition wants to make to know the evolution of the School during hundreds years and the transformation of librarians. On the other hand, the Seminar hopes to bring together representatives from leading European LIS schools to discuss together the challenges faced by our field and to take a major step forward in our shared analysis and in our strategic planning. It will be held in Barcelona, 4-5 June 2015. We hope to see you in the Seminar!

Enjoy it!

Andreu Sulé

University of Barcelona

Hello!

Few days ago, OCLC and Library of Congress have made to know a very interesting executive summary of a white paper, Common Ground: Exploring Compatibilities Between the Linked Data Models of the Library of Congress and OCLC, about the compatibility of linked data initiatives at both institutions. More specifically, between the Bibliographic Framework Initiative (BIBFRAME) at the Library of Congress and the Schema.org and BiblioGraph.net application profiles at OCLC.

Beyond the advance and future research lines of confluence between OCLC and the Library of Congress initiatives, this executive summary shows to what extent the linked data are in the forefront of the most important library organizations of the world.  How libraries are conscious that the future of information retrieval, discovery and access depends on the Web in a collaborative sense. That means they have to get out of its comfortable zone and to promote the interoperability of its data with agents of other communities. Linked data is here to stay!

Enjoy it!

Andreu Sulé

University of Barcelona

Hello,

Today, 30th January, has finished BOBCATSSS 2015, the annual LIS conference promoted by EUCLID that is addressed mainly to students and organized by students. This year, organizers have been students from the Masaryk University, Czech Republic, and the University of Tampere, Finland.

The BOBCATSSS 2015 edition has been held in Brno, the beautiful city of the Czech Republic. During three days, studentsof all countries (mainly from Europe, but also from USA, Colombia, etc.) have shared their knowledge in paper, poster, pecha-kucha or workshopway.

The 250 attendants have also been able to enjoy of three very prestigious keynotes speakers: Sinikka Sipilä(President of IFLA 2013-2015), Jay Edwin Gillette(Professor of Information and Communication Sciences at Ball State University, USA) and Roberta Tassi(researcher on the relation between communication design and service design).

Organizers also have offered to attendants guided visits to the most sightseeing LIS centersin Brno: Central Library of Faculty of Arts, The Museum of Romani Culture, Moravian regional archive, etc.

In the closing ceremony, BOBCATSSS 2015’s organizers have delivered the BOBCATSSS flag to organizers of BOBCATSSS 2016 (see picture), students from the École nationale supérieure des sciences de l’information et des bibliothèques(Enssib), France, the Paris Descartes University, France, and The University of Tennessee, USA. The conference will be held in Lyon, France. Good luck for them and we will see you in Lyon next year.

Enjoy it!

Andreu Sulé

University of Barcelona

Hello,

With the growth of social networks, habits in the use and consume of academic production have changed. More and more researchers are using blogs, Facebook, Twitter, etc. to spread their papers and to be informed about resources of their interest.

In this context, some metric researchers propose a new way to calculate the impact of academic production called altmetrics. This term was coined in 2010 and aspires to incorporate the online activity around scholarly literature (views, discussions, bookmarking, citations, etc.) in the measurement of its impact. It is true this is a very controversial point of view, but it is also true almetrics is here to stay.

As a leader in this alternative metric, the start-up Almetric has just published Altmetric Top 100 2014, “a review of the 100 papers that received the most attention online, and the conversations that happened around them”. To elaborate this list, Almetric took into account “all mentions and shares of articles published from November 2013 onwards in mainstream and social media, blogs, post-publication peer-review forums, bookmarking sites and platforms such as Reddit and YouTube”.

You can filter the list by journal, institution, category, country and access type, and of each article you can see the number of mentions, and read them!, in each web service (blogs, Twitter, Facebook, Google +, etc.).

Even if you do not agree with almetrics... enjoy it!

Andreu Sulé

University of Barcelona

Hello,

For many of us, Google has represented always speed, precision and… neutrality. That means that Google does not manipule the SERP (Search engine results page) and  always show the most relevant entries for people. But after reading Enrique Dans’s post “Google and the right to manipulate search results” I am beginning to have my doubts.

On the basis of a judicial victory of Google in US courts about its Search Engine Page Results (SERP), Enrique Dans denounces that the California Giant editorializes its results of searches “so that instead of us finding the most relevant results, we first find those that offer its services”.

We even can see this change of paradigm in the way Google distributes results on SERP: “Google has reduced the space that natural results occupy to around 20% of the screen area, filling the rest with advertising and its own products”.

Troubled? I think we have reasons to be worried, but even this… Enjoy it!

Andreu Sulé

University of Barcelona