ASIST 2009

This year ASIST was in Vancouver. Vancouver is of course busy preparing for the 2010 Winter Olympics so many olympic things are spread around the city. I walked around and looked at the many new eagle statues and the olympic rings in the harbour.





I presented two posters at the conference. The first was at the SIG-CR workshop pre-conference session and the second was in the 3rd poster session of the main conference. Considering it was the last day of the conference in the afternoon there were a fair number of people who came to view the posters.

Exploring Measures of Inter-Tagger Consistency. SIG-CR Workshop Poster, Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. http://eprints.rclis.org/17218/

Searching with Tags: Do Tags Help Users Find Things? Annual Meeting of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada. http://eprints.rclis.org/17348/

And of course the view on the flight out is good too...

Canoeing on the Ottawa River

Thesis: Defended

On July 20th I defended my thesis titled "Information Organisation Practices on the Web: Tagging and the Social Organisation of Information"



I wrote the entire thesis in OpenOffice on a Linux based computer and used Calc and OpenStat to do most of the calculations. I also used CiteULike to record my references. If nothing else, this certainly proves that OpenOffice is a full blown office suite.

The thesis is based on a series of conference and journal papers, so perhaps 50 or 60% of the material has already been published or presented at conferences. I thought the method worked well for an emerging phenomenon.

Canadian Copyright Consultation

Consultations on copyright have begun. There are already a number of interesting comments.

Michael Geist has also put together a website to keep track of discussion on the official government site: http://speakoutoncopyright.ca/.

Privacy and Copyright

Calgary Herald: No place for state in our hard drives?

Pope Benedict XVI encyclical letter denounces excessive zeal for assertions of intellectual property rights in knowledge

Pope Benedict XVI encyclical letter denounces excessive zeal for assertions of intellectual property rights in knowledge.

Government consultations on Canadian Copyright Reform

This time the government is going to run consultations before tabling another copyright bill. The last copyright bill read like a wish list of the big entertainment industries, so hopefully the next will have a more Canadian focus.

CBC: Canadian copyright forums could begin next week