i3 – Information: interactions and impact – is a conference held at Robert Gordon University in Aberdeen every two years. This year’s conference was held in late June, the fifth in the series, and the first I’d had a chance to go to. Located in the Aberdeen Business School, the conference venue gave a chance… Continue reading i3 in the Grey City
Category: information behaviour and literacies, understanding
ECIL 2014
In late October, I was fortunate enough to be able to attend the European Conference on Information Literacy (ECIL2014) in Dubrovnik, Croatia, to give a keynote talk. Those who have visited Dubrovnik (or watched Game of Thrones) will know how beautiful it is; others can find out here. This is the second ECIL conference, the… Continue reading ECIL 2014
Altmetrics, qualitative understanding and the Croatian seaside
The LIDA (Libraries in the Digital Age) series of conferences,initially annual and now biannual, has become something of an institution since it was established in 2000. Its location, now in the beautiful Adriatic city of Zadar, having migrated up and down the Croatian coast over the years, is certainly one factor in its popularity. Its… Continue reading Altmetrics, qualitative understanding and the Croatian seaside
In praise of messy desks
One of the advantages of being disorderly is that one is constantly making exciting discoveries (AA Milne) Some of us naturally have tidy desks. Others of us, including myself, do not. And we in the latter camp have traditionally been made to feel inadequate, if not slovenly. This is, of course, grossly unfair. It has… Continue reading In praise of messy desks
Visualizing, saving time and promoting insight
An interesting recent paper by Luciano Floridi, doyen of the philosophy of information, and his colleagues Min Chen and Rita Borgo asks what information visualization, one of the hottest topics in the information sciences over recent years in really for. Their answer is an intriguing one; it is not, as most visualization enthusiasts would have… Continue reading Visualizing, saving time and promoting insight
Dr Nicholson and his metabolic maps
Many years ago, in another life, while I was studying organic chemistry, my eyes often wandered to the colourful and complicated maps of biochemical pathways which often hung in lecture rooms and laboratories. I’m sorry to say that I paid them little attention, other than to reflect that I was lucky to have avoided the… Continue reading Dr Nicholson and his metabolic maps
Emergence, novices, and all things new
The rather sudden arrival of spring leads one (well, leads me), naturally enough, to think of new things and emerging entities, and their information needs and consequences. Most obviously we might think of providing the knowledge needed by learners, at all stages and in any subject or topic, and of the need for those learners… Continue reading Emergence, novices, and all things new
Alas for the paperless office. Weep for the fragile archive.
Farewell, obscure objects of desire, an article by Matthew Reisz in the Times Higher (19th January 2012) reports a British Academy conference on open access academic publishing. It attributes some interesting views to Alice Prochaska, principal of Somerville College, Oxford, who notes that libraries and archives have invested huge resources in digitisation projects to make… Continue reading Alas for the paperless office. Weep for the fragile archive.
Fads, assimilations and knowledge management
While writing a review for Aslib Proceedings of a new text on knowledge management, Kevin C. Desouza and Scott Paquette's Knowledge Management: an introduction, I commented that there was a bit of a contradiction in the way that the book addresses Tom Wilson's criticism – in his 2002 paper, The nonsense of knowledge management -… Continue reading Fads, assimilations and knowledge management
Information Ecology in Bratislava
Last week I had the chance to attend a conference on the topic of 'Information Ecology and Libraries', held at the library of the Comenius University in Bratislava. Organised by Jela Steinerová, of the University's department of library and information science, the meeting attracted participants from several countries. The city of Bratislava has now entirely… Continue reading Information Ecology in Bratislava
The Occasional Informationist 