“There are too many books. They are being produced every day in torrential abundance. Many of them are useless and stupid; their existence and their conservation is a dead weight upon humanity.” José Ortega Y Gasset stated the latter words in a famous speech titled “Mission of the Librarian”, about 90 years ago. As we all know, the situation has grown worse. Jensen et al. published a nice study few years ago which showed that it has become impossible for biomedical researchers to finish reading all the relevant articles in their individual areas of research. Information technology (IT) is a principal driver for the information flood. However, taking inspiration from the dictum of a “double-edged sword”, Mostafa argues that the potential for IT to address the challenges associated with information use has not been carefully examined and exploited. There are numerous opportunities to enhance the full scholarly information life-cycle by designing and deploying innovative human-information applications—starting with idea generation and ending with new scholarly information dissemination. A thorough discussion of the full information life-cycle, may take too long and it may be out-of-scope in this forum. Hence, Mostafa will concentrate on a few key aspects. Specifically, four facets will be covered: 1) Information ideation, 2) Document and data production, 3) Intelligent document societies/communities, and 4) Scholarly ecosystems where scholars and documents engage in dialogs and debates. Wherever appropriate, Mostafa will point out relevant R&D activities conducted by researchers in his laboratory and other researchers around the world.
Speaker: This talk will be presented by Javed Mostafa, Professor, iSchool & Biomedical Research Imaging Center-School of Medicine, The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, USA. Javed is a proud “Longhorn”, who was able to secure a PhD many years ago at the UT iSchool, under the tutelage of Professor Francis Miksa.