October 2008 Archives

This blog is about an academic person who is famous for work they have done related to my own interests. I chose to do someone who I have read several papers by for IST classes. T. D. Wilson is someone I have read several papers by on the topic of Information Seeking Behavior. This is a research area that interests me as I am interested in information search. Information Seeking Behavior is a part of search and looks at how searchers behave when they are searching. Because I had read the papers by him I decided T. D. Wilson was someone I wanted to know more about so I chose him as someone to look at for this blog.

Professor Tom Wilson has a detailed website (http://informationr.net/tdw/) which provides information about his life, career, research publications, consulting work, cats and photography. He is currently as Professor Emeritus at the University of Sheffield, a Visiting Professor at the University of Leeds Business School and a Visiting Professor at Högskolan i Borås in Sweden.

Professor Wilson has had a variety of positions from working as in libraries to being a lecturer at universities. From 1983 to 2000 he was a professor of Information Studies at the University of Sheffield and severed as the head of the Department from 1982 to 1997. He is currently retired though continues to do active research.  He has received several awards. His website provides more details on his career.

On his website when describing his research interests Professor Wilson writes that his interests have centered on information seeking behavior and information needs. He has also done work in office automation, information systems strategies, information service evaluation, and the impact of information technology on organizations. He has done work on electronic scholarly publishing and digital libraries and how they have affected traditional academic libraries, businesses and the web.

My research interests are related to Professor Wilson's as my interests involve Information Seeking Behavior. So, it is likely that some of his past work in that area will be helpful for some of my future research. Another thing I liked is how on his website as well as putting information about his academic career it was also clearly shown that he has several interests outside of his research as well. For instance, he states that he likes cats, traveling, photography, and birdwatching. None of these, with the exception of traveling, are particular interests of mine, but like him I have several hobbies, such as reading, listening to opera and learning about history that are not necessarily connected to my research but that I want to remain a part of my life.

This blog entry describes three publication venues that I might want to have my work published in some day.

The first publication I will mention is one that I described briefly in the last blog. That is Information Processing and Management. It is an international journal published by Elsevier. The website of the journal provides an overview of the types of refereed papers the journal is interested in. Some examples include work on information retrieval, digital libraries, information processing, search engines, information representation, classification, extraction, filtering and summarization, human information needs, seeking, searching and use. For more information see the journal's website description of the journal.
The journal is published regularly (for 2009 it will be volume 45 with 6 issues). It also is planning three special issues on "Semantic Annotations in Information Retrieval", "Managing and Mining Multilingual Documents", and "Collaborative Information Seeking". Lastly, the journal has a new electronic submission and handling system called "Elsevier Editorial System" (EES), which allows for online submission, review and status update. EES is part of the journals efforts to improve the efficiency and accuracy of its' editorial procedures and the timeliness of the manuscripts published.

A second potential publication venue for me is the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology. An online version of the journal is published through Wiley InterScience. This journal publishes peer-reviewed research from the field of information science and other related fields. It focuses on but is not limited to the processing of recorded knowledge. According to its' website it has "basic and applied research on the generation, recording, storage, representation, retrieval, visualization, dissemination, and evaluation of information." It is oriented towards quantitative, experimental studies, but is also interested in qualitative investigations. On the journal website the topics the journal is interested in are separated into four groups: theory (e.g. foundations of information science, informetrics, information retrieval and filtering models and principles, data mining etc.), communication (media theory, theories of communication, computer-supported collaborative work, etc.), management (e.g. economics of information, information policy, social and organizational informatics, etc.) and systems (e.g. information system design, disciplinary, organization and institutional case histories, information technology hardware and software, online and web-based retrieval systems, etc.).

The third potential publication venue for me that I will describe is ACM Transactions on the Web. It is like the other two a journal that publishes refereed articles. The articles from the journal are available online from the ACM digital library. It focuses on reporting the results of research on web content, applications, use, and related technologies. Some of the topics included in the journal are browsers and web interfaces, knowledge management and representation on the web, electronic commerce, hypertext and hypermedia. In addition, searching, indexing, classification, retrieval and querying, data mining analysis papers that deal with the web are also within the scope of the journal. More examples of other topics that are within the scope of the journal are given on the journals website.

The three journals described above are all journals that publish research in the area that I intend to do research in. For instance, all of them have published articles on information search on the web, which is an interest of mine. In addition, I have read good research articles from all three journals. This is why they seem like good journals for me to consider publishing in later on in my career.

This blog is about academic communities that I might want to be a part of some day. The first academic community that I am going to discuss is the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM).  ACM was founded in 1947 and according to Wikipedia has 83,000 members. It is the world's largest educational and scientific computing society. Its goal is to deliver resources that advance computing as a science and profession. It provides a Digital Library and has many publications, conferences and career resources. Some of ACM's publications include Communications of the ACM, several other magazines, several journals, and several transactions (e.g. Transactions on Information Systems and Transactions on the Web). For more information see their website.

Interestingly ACM also has a couple of publications that are joint publications with the second academic community I will describe, the Institute of Electrical and Electronics Engineers (IEEE). IEEE was founded in 1963 and according to Wikipedia has more than 365,000 members. It is a non-profit organization and a leading authority on many areas of engineering ranging from aerospace systems, computers and telecommunications to consumer electronics. It is as source of professional and technical information, resources and services. Some quick facts about IEEE include that it has nearly 1,300 standards and projects under development, more than 1.7 million documents in its Electronic Library, publishes 144 transactions, journals and magazines and sponsors more than 850 conferences annually. For more information see their website.

The third academic communities I will describe is Information Processing and Management.     Information Processing and Management is a journal, which is aimed at "information scientists, computer scientists, librarians, cognitive scientists, and information systems and technology specialists interested in information retrieval (IR), organization of information, and management of information resources." (http://www.elsevier.com/wps/find/journaldescription.cws_home/244/description#description ).  The website for journal provides information on current issues of the journal, how to submit articles, how to subscribe to the journal and other journals in the same research area.

These three communities seem like communities that I might be interested in joining one day because they all publish papers on topics related to my research. In fact I have read articles published by all three communities mentioned above. Next week I will write more about publication venues I might be interested in the future.

I choose to do this blog entry about Mimi Zhang who works with Dr. Jansen. She is originally from China and has a Bachelor of Management, in Information Management and Information Systems from Hefei University of Technology in China and a Master of Science in Information and Knowledge Management from Loughborough University in the UK. She is currently a Ph.D. candidate in IST at Penn State.  She came to IST in 2005. She does not have a dissertation topic yet. Her research interests are in human-computer interaction (HCI), computer-mediated communication (CMC), cognitive psychology, e-commerce, transaction log analysis, and experimental design. She is specifically interested in information seeking behavior and applying theories from multiple disciplines to gain a better understanding of users and advance the theoretical framework. She focuses on both theoretical and empirical aspects of how people search and has been involved in many different types of user studies. Mimi has one journal paper with two other journal papers in progress or being reviewed. In addition she has published several conference and workshop papers and presented several posters. Please see her personal website (http://www.personal.psu.edu/mxz178/index.html) for more information as most of the information in the posting was taken from there.

As stated in multiple previous blogs my advisor is Dr. Jim Jansen. This blog entry will look at his academic life and career, for more detailed information see the academic portion of his personal web site: http://ist.psu.edu/faculty_pages/jjansen/academic/academic.html. Dr. Jansen is an Assistant Professor in the College of Information Sciences and Technology at the Pennsylvania State University and has affiliate appointments with the Department of Industrial and Manufacturing Engineering and the Department of Computer Science and Engineering. He is also the Co-Director of the Information Searching and Learning Laboratory. He has published 55 journal articles, 105 conference publications or presentations, 2 books, 8 book reviews, and 10 book chapters. He is a member of the editorial boards of 6 international journals and has received 14 different awards and honors: one leadership and management award, two research awards, three best paper awards, six application development awards, and two writing awards.

Dr. Jansen has published in various journals including Information Processing  & Management, IEE Computer, the Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, and the Communications of the ACM. He has also published in many other journals. He has had presentations at many different conferences including SIGIR, WWW, the American Society for Information Science & Technology, the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society, and  the IEEE International Conference on Information Technology, Coding and Computing, as well as many other conferences. In the past few semesters he has taught multiple courses including IST 590 (last spring), IST 516 (last fall) and many other IST courses including the introductory undergraduate course for IST and a Capstone Design course for IST. Dr. Jansen has also supervised many undergraduate and graduate students doing research. His research interests include web information retrieval and information system design. His website linked to above provides more detailed information on his research interests, publications, courses taught and a list of students that have worked with him on research projects and what their topics were.