Information Research Weblog

Red Herring was one of the wave of new business magazines that hit the newsstands some years ago, did well in the dot.com boom and then came to a juddering stop. RH has lasted longer than some of these and, especially in its early years, I found it interesting. Now it is announced that it has ceased publication. However, the original co-founder has in mind to resurrect the magazine when market sentiment changes. That may be some time, of course, but, as the mag was more interesting under his original direction than it became later, it will be one to watch out for.

I picked this up from Current Cites - a useful e-mail newsletter, and also a Web site. Eric Lease Morgan has produced an introduction to XML, Getting started with XML, specifically for librarians and library staff, although I think it will be equally useful to anyone who things of themselves as an information manager or even a knowledge manager. The guide is available as a .pdf file and as an html file, as well as .zip and .tar.gz files, which include sample files. An introduction to XHTML is also provided, as a 'dialect' of XML - this might prove useful, as I hope to move from html to xhtml with volume 9 of the journal.

The guide is part of Morgan's own Web site, Infomotions, which also includes 'Musings on information and librarianship', his monthly column for Computers in libraries.

While searching for information on the King County wireless Internet system, I came across a conference series I hadn't seen before, which is available on the Web. It's the Virtual Reference Desk Conference series. The first thing that hit my screen was a discussion between Mike Eisenberg (University of Washington) and Charles McClure (Florida State University) in the second conference in 2000, which is entertaining as well as informative. However, there's a lot more there on the impact of the Internet, and of electronic connection between user and library that points to significant changes going on and likely to accelerate.

The latest papers (although, in fact, most are presentations rather than papers) available are those from the 2002 conference. One of the 'exemplary' papers is from Simon Bains at the University of Edinburgh on Testing Collaborative Electronic Reference Services: The Experience of UK University Research Libraries in the Use of QuestionPoint

All in all, worth a browse.

I don't know how many of you are interested in RM issues, but it's the area of "Information Management" in which I work, so sorry if you couldn't care less about it - skip to the next post. :-) http://www.rmaa.com.au/ is the home page for the Records Management Association of Australia and they have a listserv which you can join by going to http://listserver.cowan.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/rmaa and the archive of previous posts is found at http://listserver.cowan.edu.au/pipermail/rmaa/

Boxes and Arrows might be a site of some interest to some of you. Some fascinating articles in the area of Information Research, the web, html, controlled vocabularies and other matters.

As a Records Manager, I'm more interested in how it relates to RM, so the "controlled vocabulary" article was the one of most interest to me so far. Perhaps others could look around and suggest which links they find of most interest, and even some critiques.

Greetings from snowy Poland. I'm in the old city of Torun, which currently has snow falling. I'm at a conference here of the DELOS group - dedicated to digital libraries in Europe. The papers will be published in some form after the conference and should be of interest to many readers of Information Research. In the interim, after the conference, the powerpoint presentations will be on the Web site of ICIMSS - I'll keep an eye on this myself and let people know when they are available.

Just before I go... Today's Financial Times has a fairly lengthy article on Web accessibility: "Rich rewards for sites set on accessibility", which also reproduces IBM's guidelines on the subject. I couldn't find it by browsing the Web site (www.ft.com) but tracked it down through a search.

Tom

If you don't already know the Current Cites Web site and associated e-mail bulletin, I suggest you check it out. The current issue has some very interesting citations, including one to an online magazine called Syllabus, which has some interesting articles on technology in higher education. Those with an interest in online teaching and learning will find the first paper of interest: Designing for Learning: The Pursuit of Well-Structured Content, by Judith V. Boettcher.

Tom