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An earthquake is a series of shock waves generated following the brittle failure of rocks within the earth's crust or upper mantle as a result of a build up of stress. Many earthquakes occur each year, on average greater than 800,000 but most are small and not felt humans. The occurrence of a dangerous earthquake, with a magnitude of greater than 8.0 can be expected every 8 to 10 years. Each earthquake has some main factors which are as follows: aftershock, benioff zone, epicenter, focal zone, magnitude and so on. Recently, throughout the entire world earthquake occurrence statistics has been increased. The most important earthquakes are called "Tsunami". Thus, many governments attempt to increase earthquake safety around their countries through implementing special programs such as reinforcing buildings, increasing people's awareness about earthquake safety through mass media, doing special programs regarding the earthquake at schools, geologists' writings about earthquake safety, determining a special day as the universal day of earthquake safety and creating different websites about earthquake safety.
Regarding to the importance of such a matter, we introduce an annotated webliography entitled Annotated Webliography of Earthquake Safety (AWES). It is accessible at: http://www.geocities.com/eqsafety_awes/ . AWES provides end-users with general information on earthquake event and its safety rules. It has been composed of 12 websites including:
Dividing AWES to three main parts (Table of contents, Body, Index), connecting them to each other through hyperlinks and extracting some keywords from the body to be used as a simple search mechanism are among techniques which have been designed to facilitate navigation over the site. AWES calls you!
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Publishing huge amounts of information on the World Wide Web and weaknesses of Internet search engines in information retrieval (Alimohammadi, 2003; Christensen, 1999; Drott, 2002; Henshaw, 1999; Kruger, 1999; Nowick, 2002; Zhang and Dimitroff, 2005) have had library and information professionals to design and develop human compiled/edited/generated search tools over the recent years. These search tools i.e. web directories are divided into several types including portals, subject gateways, webliographies and etc. Webliographies are specially considered in this note.
To satisfy information needs more quickly and easily, the Internet users’ community prefers to refer to the filtered, high quality and well-structured subject collections of information. They are looking for some way of reaching this purpose. Using webliographies is a solution in this direction. Accurately, the main purpose of this note is to do some survey on webliographies for measuring webliographies quantity and determining the feasibility of designing subject-oriented meta-webliographies. Simply put: to facilitate access to the fully enhanced subject collections of information on the World Wide Web, we propose designing meta-webliographies based on the subject domain or designing subject-oriented meta-webliographies. In order to do this, the most useful and huge-bulked subject domains for designing meta-webliographies were identified.
To carry out the research, the survey method was adopted and used. The statistical society of the present research includes 675 webliographies that have been identified through Google. By using Google, two searches on webliography and webography (only the singular form of words used) were made with some limitations – including language (English) and field (in the title of the page) in February 2005. A total of 675 hits were retrieved. Google claimed that more than 990 hits were retrieved but this claim turned out to be false. Then each item was checked out to identify its subject domain.
The discovered hits were categorized into 6 domains including Social Sciences (382 = 59 %), Applied Sciences (221 = 32 %), Medical Sciences (36 = 5 %), Arts (22 = 3 %), Pure Sciences (13 = 1 %) and Agriculture (1 = 0 %). Looking at the findings shows that social sciences are the widest domain for designing subject-oriented meta-webliographies. Potts (2004) has stressed that first webliographies stem from the literature that is a sub-domain of humanities. According to the findings, it can be concluded that humanities are not currently the pioneer of webliography designing movement. Applied sciences, medical sciences, arts and pure sciences are at the next levels. Unfortunately, agriculture had just one webliography. It is likely that agricultural web directories are still in the infancy period of their development. Sociologists, engineers, physicians, artists and scientists are encouraged to design and develop meta-webliographies in their own specialization field (Such projects can also be conducted by subject specialists).
The aim of the present survey is to measure the sophistication scale of Meta-tag Generators in respect of keywords and description meta-tags production ability and also in terms of keywords and description meta-tags presence on their source codes. To carry out the research, 731 Meta-tag Generators were identified through Google. The Homepages and the HTML documents (source codes) of the statistical society were reviewed manually in terms of the ability to provide end-users (web designers) with the most developed keywords and description producer fields and the presence of keywords and description meta-tags on their source codes. The findings of the survey showed that 98.8 percent of Meta-tag Generators have effective and pre-designed fields for the production of keywords and description meta-tags. It was also found out that 65.9 percent and 67.3 percent of Meta-tag Generators have been enhanced by keywords and description meta-tags on their source codes (HTML documents) respectively. The paper concludes that more attention should be paid to the designing Meta-tag Generators and recommends their reversioning and development in an age of XML.
History: Traditionally, acquiring, organizing, storing, retrieving and disseminating the information have had been library and information professionals' concerns/research interests. These duties have been considered during the long history of preservation and conservation of the human's historical and cultural heritage. These characteristics have been reinforced in recent years as well as creating/making the digitized information accessible has been accelerated on the World Wide Web. This means that Library and Information Science (LIS) community has tried to adopt some useful solutions to do the best based on an updated approach. Several schemas have been planned and an increasing number of projects have been done in order to facilitate access to the digitized information and at the same time to reach for recall and precision in information retrieval (IR) process as an ideal purpose in information research. Creating the concept of Meta-tag that is a means to control the process of web indexing (Alimohammadi, 2003) is an example in this direction.
Definition: Meta-tags are non-displaying or hidden HTML tags that may provide site owners and authors with a degree of control over how a web page is indexed (Henshaw, 1999; Henshaw & Valauskas, 2001). Meta-tags can be used to identify properties of a document (e.g. keywords, description etc.) and assign values to those properties (Beeline, 2004). They might help designer and publisher ensure that their materials are found when appropriate searches are executed (Turner & Brackbill, 1998). There are many meta-tags in HTML. But, the most important meta-tags which search engines use them for web indexing purposes are "description" and "keywords".
Automating the process: Unfortunately, it's time consuming to add meta-tags to a web resource manually. In an upper level, maintaining meta-tags can quickly become tedious for large, content-rich sites (Coopee, 2000). Christensen (1999) has pointed out the necessity to create more tools to help automate this task. For this reason, a number of software tools have yet been produced to make this process easier. These products are in fact free or fee-based software packages that accept your intended raw data as an input and provide you with formal HTML meta-tags as an output. They are called by several business names such as Meta-tag Builder, Meta-tag Creator, Meta-tag Designer, Meta-tag Generator, Meta-tag Maker and Meta-tag Producer.
To the best of the author's knowledge, so far no survey has been done on Meta-tag Generators. Alimohammadi (2004) in his recent survey on the Iranian web sites proposed doing a review on meta-tag Generators. This research is done in order to do a brief but a bilateral study on free Meta-tag Generators according to their ability in providing web designers with the most developed keywords and description producer fields and also keywords and description meta-tags use. To more clarify the research topic, it must be kept in mind that Meta-tag Generators try to produce various types of meta-tags; mainly to save the time of web designers. The outputted meta-tags, then, are entered to the source codes of the intended web sites. We, in contrast, aim to evaluate Meta-tag Generators based on their sophistication scale. In other words, Meta-tag Generators should be able to provide end-users with the needed meta-tags just in time and at the same time should be equipped well with complete and accurate meta-tags on their source codes. It seems that this is an effective way to judge about Meta-tag Generators.
There are four main questions in this research as follows:
Four hypotheses are provided in this research too:
Based on an immediate observation (as an effective tool for such a research), the survey method was used to study Meta-tag Generators. The statistical society of the present research includes 731 Meta-tag Generators that have been identified through Google.
By using Google, six isolated searches on Meta-tag Builder, Meta-tag Creator, Meta-tag Designer, Meta-tag Generator, Meta-tag Maker and Meta-tag Producer were made one by one with some limitations including language (English) and field (in the title of the page) in October 2004. A total of 731 hits were retrieved. Google claimed about 1900 hits were retrieved totally but this claim turned out to be false. However, Home pages and HTML documents or source codes of the retrieved hits were reviewed manually in order to gather the needed data.
As discussed, the statistical society was surveyed manually according to the keywords and description meta-tags. On the one hand, it has been identified that 722 Meta-tag Generators (98.8 %) provide two fields through which keywords and description meta-tags can be prepared well. On the other hand, it has been discovered that 482 (65.9 %) and 492 (67.3 %) Meta-tag Generators have been enhanced by keywords and description meta-tags on their source codes respectively.
If you have a look at four hypotheses of this research, you can find out that they are confirmed according to the findings of the survey. At the first step (the first two hypotheses), most of Meta-tag Generators (98.8 %) provide users with the requested fields. These fields are applied in the meta-tag production process; a process through which you as an end-user (web designers) can obtain the formal and standard form of the HTML meta-tags to enter them to the web site's source code. Nevertheless, it can be asked that why the quantity of Meta-tag Generators and their keywords and description meta-tags fields are not in an equal level?
But the latter i.e. the quantity of meta-tags use among Meta-tag Generators (the second two hypotheses) is very lower than one can imagine. Basically, Meta-tag Generators were designed to help web designers write their own meta-tags easily. In the real world, there is some difference between the intended purpose of Meta-tag Generators and the quality of their structure. Much distance can be shown among the programmers' ideals and the current situation of Meta-tag Generators. If we believe that meta-tags can improve the effectiveness of information retrieval on the World Wide Web (Turner & Brackbill, 1998; Henshaw & Valauskas, 2001; Zhang and Dimitroff, 2004, 2005), then more attention should be paid to the designing software tools like Meta-tag Generators.
Based on the outcomes of this brief research, reversioning Meta-tag Generators are recommended. Developing Meta-tag Generators to be capable of preparing meta-tags/metadata in the context of the XML is also proposed.
Acknowledgment: The author would like to acknowledge Miss Mahshid sajjadi for her helpful and critical comments on the earlier draft of the article.
Islamic Consultative Assembly Library (ICALIB) is one of the Iranian oldest libraries. ICALIB is currently 81 years old. It has had a main role in preserving and conserving historical documents, organizing, storing and retrieving sources of information in the area of cultural studies and disseminating the information on cultural heritage during the 20th century. Because of its highlighted position among other Iranian documentation centers, it has developed its own web site from four years ago to provide end-users with sufficient information on time.
This brief report is the result of the first phase of a survey on the Islamic Consultative Assembly Library Web Site (ICALIBS). This is in fact an evaluative study on the ICALIBS through doing a comparative analysis among this web site and other parliamentary library web sites. The analysis is based on some criteria identified through the Net. We aim to highlight characteristics and features of the ICALIBS and proposing some recommendation for developing the site. In order to do the survey; we searched the World Wide Web to gather some data about the state of the art of the research problem.
The first step: By using Google, two isolated searches on “Parliamentary Library” and “Assembly Library” were made with some limitations – including language (English) and field (in the title of the page). A total of 131 hits were retrieved. Google claimed that more than 1360 hits (1280 hits for the first phrase and 83 hits for the second one) were retrieved but this claim turned out to be false. However, retrieved hits were observed one by one to discover the intended data. Reviewing results led to identification of several measures upon which reaching for the purpose of this study would be achievable. Our measures are in fact the main elements that should be appeared on a parliamentary library web site. They are as Follows:
The second step: As it can be shown, 13 elements were discovered. In this step, we divided each of the items to two parts. The first part is dedicated to the existence of the item on the ICALIBS and the second part is related to the content of the item. For example when we discuss about the OPAC, a + is dedicated to the item because of its existence or structure and another + is intended for its content or in other words for its effective activity. Therefore, we have 26 sub-parts that comprise 13 main elements. Each sub-part is measured according to a point with 3.85 credits. Points compile 100.1 credits; but we decrease them to a collection of 100 credits for ease of judgment.
The third step: ICALIBS was evaluated according to the measures in this step. The Table 1 illustrates given positive and negative points.
| Theme | Structure | Content |
|---|---|---|
| About us | | |
| Contact us | |
|
| Events/ News | ||
| Historical overview and achievements | ||
| OPAC | ||
| Opening hours | ||
| Publications | ||
| Search | ||
| Services | ||
| Site map | ||
| Useful links | ||
| Virtual reference desk | ||
| Virtual tour |
According to the table, 17 sub-parts have obtained positive points. This means that ICALIBS can attain 65.45 credits of 100. This is the current situation of the ICALIBS among its equivalents on the World Wide Web.
Regarding to the final point of the ICALIBS, it can be told that it is in need of serious and urgent refinements according to the existed criteria, i.e. structure and content of other parliamentary library web sites. Of course, national and cultural implications affect the redesigning program. In other words, the program should be planned with respect to these characteristics. But an indisputable point is that some major modifications must be developed to enhance the ICALIBS including search mechanism and virtual tour. Minor verifications should also be implemented on some other elements such as contact us, opening hours, services, site map and virtual reference desk. Developing the English version of the ICALIBS is another important plan. Through the recommended revisions a new version of the site could be uploaded well. Doubtless, it will be pride of the ICALIB.
Every discipline has its own academic programs, professional society and job market. These three factors are essential, if a discipline is going to be named as a branch of human knowledge. From the point of view of this brief note, academic programs are more important than others. These instructional courses are mainly designed in order to educate some interested people with the aim of transforming them to specialists. In any discipline, graduates comprise the body of the profession and a part of the society's human resources as a whole. There is a significant relationship between an academic program and its graduates: the more effective program, the more powerful graduates. Consequently, satisfaction of job market needs is an immediate result of the effectiveness of an academic program. In other words, the degree of retardation/progression among academic programs and job market is always equal. The above principles have been accepted in Library and Information field as well as any other discipline. Because of this reason, the current study aimed to prepare a common list of the most-updated Library and Information Science (LIS) courses that are being taught all over the world. Since most of the Iranian LIS students are studying the field in an undergraduate level; we just focus on these courses. The survey method and the observation technique were adopted and used in this study, because we had to have an immediate look at the web sites of LIS Departments. Statistical society of the present study was comprised of 79 LIS Departments identified through the Open Directory (www.dmoz.org). Among the studied Departments, 25 provide undergraduate programs in which 15 have been affiliated to the American Universities and 10 to the other parts of the world including Europe, Oceania, Middle East and Africa. The lists of undergraduate programs of the statistical society were observed one by one in order to gather the needed data. At the end of the survey, two lists of common courses were prepared and arranged in the following tables. The lists consist of 68 credits in which 58 are compulsory and 10 are elective.
| Number | Title | Credits |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Introduction to Information Science | |
| 2 | Information Policy | |
| 3 | Collection Development | |
| 4 | Organization of Information | |
| 5 | Information Sources | |
| 6 | Information Services | 7 | Information Technology | 8 | Database Management Systems | 9 | Networks and Networking | 10 | Introduction to the Internet and Search Techniques | 11 | World Wide Web Programming Languages | 12 | Website Development and Administration | 13 | Electronic Publishing | 14 | Digital Libraries | 15 | Information Architecture | 16 | Emerging Topics in Information Science | 17 | E-Learning | 18 | Information Economics | 19 | Foundations of Management | 20 | Information Systems Design and Analysis | 21 | Research Methods | 22 | Internship |
| Number | Title | Credits |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | Introduction to Artificial Intelligence | |
| 2 | Introduction to Computational Linguistics | |
| 3 | Introduction to Cognitive Sciences | |
| 4 | Management Information Systems (MIS) | |
| 5 | Children's and Youth Literature and Library Services |
The Editor-in-Chief wishes to thank Professor Michel J. Menou (France), Dr. Mohamed Taher (Canada), Dr. Rahmatollah Fattahi (Iran), and Mrs. Rashidah Begum bt. Fazal Mohamed (Malaysia) for sending us congratulation letters for publishing Webology. Thanks for their considerations.
Finally, one of the information science's dreams was realized. Annotated Webliography of Webliographies (AW of Ws) as the first tertiary source was uploaded on the World Wide Web. It is accessible at: http://www.webliography.itgo.com
Historically, among Iranian information professionals, webliography was introduced as a noticeable scientific topic in 2001 for the first time (Alimohammadi & Komijani, 2001). A Webliography, according to the accepted definition, is an enumerative list of hypertext links and a gateway to the scientific sources of information on the Net, whether annotated or not (Alimohammadi, 2004a; Portland community college, 2005; Potts, 2005; Smith, 2000). Webliographies are in fact digital equivalents of bibliographies (printed lists of information sources). Bibliographies are secondary sources among print media and Webliographies are the same on the Net (Alimohammadi, 2004b; 2004c). Advantages of webliographies as gateways that provide subject access on the World Wide Web have been discussed and designing webliographies as one of the librarians’ responsibilities has also been stressed (Harris, 1997; Marino, 1998). Three important differences among webliographies and web directories have been introduced in detail (Alimohammadi, 2004a; 2004b; 2004c) and their thesaurus relationship has been illustrated for the first time by two LIS undergraduate students (Danaie & Keshmiripour, 2004). Based on the theoretical discussions around the subject, an instructional course was developed at the Allame Tabataba'ee University resulted in designing about 25 webliographies (Alimohammadi, 2004c) and the learned skills were introduced in 14 phases which should be followed to design a webliography (Alimohammadi, 2004b). At the end of the course, the idea of designing the annotated webliography of webliographies as a tertiary source on the World Wide Web was matured and proposed in a guest commentary (Alimohammadi, 2005).
Recently, two Iranian LIS undergraduate students have designed, developed and uploaded the first version of the AW of Ws at the Allame Tabataba'ee University. This tertiary source which can also be called Meta-webliography; stands in an upper level in comparison with webliographies (online secondary sources). AW of Ws provides end-users with a high-quality and sophisticated structure through which access to a wide range of webliographies in various topics has been possible. It consists of 17 webliographies in English and Persian languages. A filtering approach has been adopted in order to preserve and improve the qualitative aspects of the project. The guidelines of designing webliographies have been followed to design annotated webliography of webliographies too. It has been presented with an annotated title and followed with a clarified description which introduces the whole of the guide, what it presents, what it doesn't present, and how it can be applied. The description is directive and to the point. According to the titles, a table of contents provides access to the included webliographies. The next part which is named body is in fact the collection of webliographies provided with meaningful annotations. Each webliography presents a unique title, an annotation, an URL, and the designer's name. After the body, an in-depth and detailed index is provided alphabetically. Based on the annotations, it facilitates access to each of the webliographies. Also, themes, melody, fonts and photos have been used delightful and lovely.
Webology journal was appeared April 1, 2004. Its first site was designed in a free server. The current site of Webology was designed in September 1, 2004.