Posts Tagged: sils

Research — No Comments
23
Jul 09

Experience Social Search – and help Chirag graduate!

Fellow SILS Ph.D. Student Chirag Shah is doing some very interesting work on his Ph.D.  You can be part of it – here is the information:

My name is Chirag Shah and I am a doctoral candidate at SILS, UNC Chapel Hill. The purpose of this email is to request your participation in a research study investigating a collaborative information seeking system.

This study requires a team of two. You need to sign up in pairs. Both the participants in a team should have worked on some project before (e.g., a class assignment). You need to sign up for two sessions, which are one to two weeks apart. Your participation will take approximately one and a half hour per session. Approximately 45 pairs of participants are being enrolled for this study.

The study will involve using an experimental system, called Coagmento, while surfing the Web. Coagmento is a plug-in for Firefox browser, which provides support for Web surfing in a team. You will be paid total $25 (per person) for two sessions (thus, a team will receive $50). The best performing team will also receive two iPod Shuffles.

To participate in this study, please visit http://www.coagmento.org/study1/signup.php and submit your request. The approval of this request is subject to meeting all the criteria specified above.

Choosing or declining to participate in this study will not affect your class standing or grades at UNC-Chapel Hill. You will not be offered or receive any special consideration if you take part in this research; it is purely voluntary. This study has been approved by the UNC Behavioral IRB (IRB Study 09-1037, Approval Date 6/10/2009), and will be supervised by Prof. Gary Marchionini (march@ils.unc.edu) at SILS.

Noticed — No Comments
25
Mar 09

Jones to Lecture on the Media Gap

Local folks: Paul Jones will give an interesting talk Tomorrow at UNC’s School of Journalism and Mass Communication. I was just reviewing his slides, and it looks like an interesting talk.

Who: Prof. Paul Jones, UNC-Chapel Hill
Where: Room 283, 2nd floor, Carroll Hall, UNC-Chapel Hill
When:Thursday March 26, at 2 pm
What: Changing Communities Inside the Media Gap

Abstract: We know that social networking software is creating new spaces for discourse and interaction. We see SNS forming the social lives and attitudes of our children and to some extent ourselves.

How did this come about? Certainly not overnight and not unnoticed by scholars and technologists.

In 1980, Tetsura Tomito noticed a media gap that he felt will soon be filled by new communications technologies. At the same time, work in the areas of social capital, friendship networks, brain scans (fMRI) and conceptions of community began to grapple with the changes within Tomito’s media gap.

This talk will look at selected attempts to understand how communities are constructed and what changes have already been noticed in these converging areas of research.

You are invited to read, edit and comment on the slides by going to GDocs here: http://tinyurl.com/JOMC-March-26 and during the presentation, you are invited to bring your backchannel discussion to the front by joining a gTalk commentary at the same address.

You’ll also want to mark your calendars, as next week’s speaker is Prof. Daniel Solove, noted privacy expert and author of The Future of Reputation, The Digital Person, and Understanding Privacy.

Noticed — No Comments
25
Feb 09

SILS seeks applicants for Dean position

Looking for a new job?  SILS is on the market for a new Dean:

The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill invites nominations and applications for the Dean of the School of Information and Library Science. The Dean, a senior level administrator, reports to the Executive Vice Chancellor/Provost. The position is a tenured academic appointment.

The Dean is expected to:

  • Provide dynamic leadership for the School’s academic programs, research, funding, faculty and staff development, and service to state and national constituents,
  • Demonstrate an awareness of the dynamic and complex nature of the field and assist in maintaining the School’s leadership role,
  • Possess successful management experience,
  • Demonstrate a commitment to a consultative, decisive, and responsive deanship,
  • Articulate the vision of the School for the University, state, and national and international communities of information professionals,
  • Provide personal commitment and leadership in pursuing an effective advancement program for the School,
  • Collaborate with faculty, staff, and students to translate the School’s vision into achievements in research, teaching, and service.

Find out more and apply here.

Teaching — No Comments
22
Jan 09

Spring 2009 Social Networks Syllabus

If you’re interested in checking out the syllabus from my spring Online Social Networks class, you can find HTML and PDF versions linked from my teaching page.  This course is a little bit of a departure from the previous two versions; I’m focusing a little more on practice-oriented challenges (OSN’s and LIS, OSN and Education, etc).  This is made possible by the large volume of literature that has come to press in recent years.  It is also due to the fact that LIS grads are being asked to explore/research/manage social web applications in their jobs, and I hope to provide some of the tools and familiarity necessary for them to do so.

As always, if you’d like to follow along you can find lecture notes and slides linked from our course webpage.  Feedback, paper recommendations, etc. are always welcome – either send them to me or tag them in delicious with inls490.

Noticed / Research — No Comments
12
Jan 09

Online Social Networks, Spring 2009

As of this morning, UNC is back in session for the spring term – how the winter break flies!  This semester I’ll be teaching my Online Social Networks course.  This is the third time I’ve taught this particular course, and it is a lot of fun.  I’m in the midst of updating the syllabus, which I’ll post to the blog when I finish.

Of potential interest to my readers is an article I discovered in the most recent issue of Portal.

Academic Libraries, Facebook and MySpace, and Student Outreach: A Survey of Student Opinion.
This study surveyed 366 Valparaiso University freshmen to discover their feelings about librarians using Facebook and MySpace as outreach tools. The vast majority of respondents had online social network profiles. Most indicated that they would be accepting of library contact through those Web sites, but a sizable minority reacted negatively to the concept. Because of the potential to infringe on students’ sense of personal privacy, it is recommended that librarians proceed with caution when implementing online social network profiles.

I’ve only skimmed this article, but I am collecting resources on social networks and libraries for one of our classes this semester. There is a growing body of literature on libraries and social networks – if you know something noteworthy feel free to leave a comment.

I would be remiss without congratulating Lori Eakin and Jeff Pomerantz, colleagues at SILS, for their study Virtual Reference, Real Money: Modeling Costs in Virtual Reference Services which appears in the same edition of Portal.

Noticed — 2 Comments
17
Dec 08

Upcoming Productivity Workshop

Via Abe Crystal, the Tri-UPA is presenting the full-day productivity workshop Reboot Your Work: Modern Methods For Productivity, Sanity, And Control.  It will be held on Tuesday, Jan 13, 2009 from 9:00 AM until 4:30 PM.

About the workshop:

In this fast-paced full-day workshop, you will learn modern techniques to juggle and prioritize all the information constantly coming at you: dozens of projects, round-the-clock demands for your attention, and the perpetual overload of email and IM.

You’ll apply the concepts using hands-on exercises at the individual, small group, and large group levels. You’ll leave with a solid system for doing your job more productively, with less effort, and a greater sense of control.

Cost is 50 dollars for students, which sounds like a great investment for starting the new year off right.  Sign up at the Triangle Usability Professionals Association site.

Hacks / Research / Software — 2 Comments
2
Dec 08

Hacking Google Scholar

If you connect to Google Scholar through a proxy (for example, through your library’s proxy), you’ll find that GS is unable to remember your preference settings.  Although Google seems to forget my preferences far too often, in the case of Google Scholar it isn’t their fault.  When you connect through a proxy you appear to Google as a different user every time, and until preferences are tied to your Google account (and not a session/cookie), Google is simply unable to remember them.

To “solve” this problem, I’ve found that you can set a bookmark that will set your preferences each time it is clicked.  While this doesn’t solve the problem of Google forgetting preferences between sessions, it will save you the time and effort of having to reset your preferences each time.  You will need to custom-craft your bookmark.  Here’s mine:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar_setprefs?num=50&scis=yes&scisf=4&submit=Save+Preferences

As you can see, in with I’m passing some options to “scholar_setprefs” – i.e. the mechanism that sets your Google Scholar preferences.  I’m manipulating two options, Number of Results (num=50) and Bibliography manager (scis=yes&scisf=4).  I could also directly manipulate the interface and search language, library links, and if the results opened new windows or not (I don’t because I’m happy with the GS defaults).

The options accept a range of values, which I’ll describe briefly:

Number of results (num), accepts:

  • 10
  • 20
  • 30
  • 50
  • 100

If you’d like 100 results to be displayed, you’d change the url so that num=100.

Bibliography manager (scis=yes&scisf=4).  Google Scholar supports a number of different export formats, and to change their default, you’ll need to change the scisf value.  Here are the corresponding values:

  • 4 (Bibtex)
  • 3 (EndNote)
  • 2 (RefMan)
  • 1 (RefWorks)
  • 5 (WenXianWang)

If you’re a RefWorks user, you’d change the string so that it looked like this scis=yes&scisf=1.

Putting it all together, if you’re a RefWorks user who wants 100 results displayed, you’d set your bookmark as follows:

http://scholar.google.com/scholar_setprefs?num=100&scis=yes&scisf=1&submit=Save+Preferences

Finally, if you’re accessing GS through your library proxy, you’ll need to add the proxy information into the URL. In the case of UNC we place the proxy information directly in the url. Therefore, my proxied bookmark looks like this:

http://scholar.google.com.libproxy.lib.unc.edu/scholar_setprefs?num=50&scis=yes&scisf=4&submit=Save+Preferences

As you can see, I’ve added .libproxy.lib.unc.edu to the beginning of the URL. This will vary by library, so you’ll want to look at other proxied URL’s at your institution to get a feel for where the proxy information goes.  As I noted above, there are a bunch of other options you can change directly. If you’d like to change those, simply view the source of the Google Scholar preferences page, look for the option and value pairs in the form, and tack them into the URL (making sure to add & before the option/value pair).

← Older Entries