Conferences in 2007

I usually try to write a short piece about the conferences I've attended along with links to presentations or papers as appropriate. This is a combined post for all conferences in 2007.

In 2007, I attended the Information Architecture Summit in Las Vegas in March, the annual conference of the Canadian Association for Information Science (CAIS) in Montreal in May, the North American Symposium on Knowlege Organisation (NASKO) in Toronto in July, the Joint Conference on Digital Libraries in Vancouver, also in July and ASIST in October.

At the IA Summit I presented a paper examining the use of non subject tags in social bookmarking systems. By non subject tags I mean tags that do not describe the topic of the item being bookmarked. Examples of such tags include @todo, cool and fun. These tags are interesting specifically because they are not the kinds of keywords you would find in a standard information organisation tool. The paper is available at http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu/1947/ and the slides are at http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00011414/.

I really enjoyed this particular session of the IA Summit. I was able to speak to a number of people who are also doing research on the phenomenon of social bookmarking and tagging and consulting with people doing similar research is certainly one of the best reasons for going to conferences. I stayed in a cheaper hotel further down the strip and walked to the conference hotel daily experiencing the sights of a new city. I also took a trip to Arizona to see the Grand Canyon... with predictable results. It snowed and I have some unique pictures of the Grand Canyon completely shrouded in fog. Obviously I have to go back.

At CAIS I presented the second half of a paper examining the terminology used in tagging. The paper examines tags used in tagging scholarly articles on Citeulike using standard informetric measures and additionally compares them to keywords assigned to these papers in Pubmed. The paper is available from http://www.cais-acsi.ca/proceedings/2007/kipp_2007.pdf and the slides are at http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00011413/.

I enjoy the CAIS conference because it allows me to keep up with the work being done in other areas of library science, and it is small enough that I can actually attend a lot more of the sessions, which is not really an option at the bigger conferences.

At NASKO I presented a further analysis of the material in my CAIS paper as well as an analysis of a set of papers drawn from JAMA, a professional journal. The paper is available from http://dlist.sir.arizona.edu/1909/ and the slides are at http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00011412/.

I had a great time at this conference. I found that I had met a lot of the presenters at previous conferences. It was great to go to a smaller conference where many more people were doing research in similar areas to mine.

At JCDL I presented a poster following on from my NASKO paper. There is a link to the poster abstract on the ACM Digital Library at http://portal.acm.org/citation.cfm?id=1255284&coll=ACM&dl=ACM&CFID=29638545&CFTOKEN=47523958 and to the poster at http://eprints.rclis.org/archive/00011411/.

I really enjoy Vancouver and it was great to visit again. Someday I have to stay for a few extra days though and take a few day trips to sites like Vancouver Island and the Capilano suspension bridge.

In October I presented at ASIST in Milwaukee. I presented a poster with the very early results from a study I am doing comparing searching an online database and a social bookmarking system via their keywords and was a presenter on a panel titled Tagging and Social Networks: The Impact of Communities on User Centered Tagging http://www.asis.org/wiki/AM07/index.php/TagSN