This paper grew out of a presentation at the "Research for LIS Practitioners Workshop" organised by the ALIA Research Committees and held at the State Library of New South Wales. The workshop was a satellite event of the Information Online Conference. The goal of the workshop was to encourage practitioner research and publication in the…

This paper examines representative research in information science and compares its designs to an abstract ideal of the experimental research design. Threats to validity of conclusions are highlighted, including history, maturation, testing, instrumentation, statistical regression, selection biases, experimental mortality, and selection-maturation…

Four empirical laws of bibliometrics--anomalous number, Lotka's, Zipf's, and Bradford's--together with Laplace's "law of succession" and de Solla Price's cumulative advantage distribution are shown to be almost identical. A simple model shows that the frequency forms conform with inverse square law over appropriate interval. (Fifteen…

Major research opportunities and needs are expected by the National Science Foundation in six areas of information science: models of adaptive information processing, learning, searching, and recognition; knowledge resource systems, particularly intelligent systems; user-system interaction; augmentation of human information processing tasks;…

Designed to provide international coverage of current research in library and information science, this quarterly journal indexes investigations, studies, surveys, and evaluated innovations. Doctoral, post-doctoral, and research staff-level work, and in-house or action research from practicing librarians, information workers, archivists, and…

Discussion of problems with fuzzy subsets in document retrieval highlights attempts to invent a system of weighted fuzzy queries in which weights correspond to relative importance of each term in query as whole, and use of Kantor's Logic for Retrieval as an alternative to Boolean queries. Six references are cited. (EJS)

In contrast to the considerable coverage of research methods and report writing, relatively little attention has been given in the professional literature to the steps that should be taken and issues which may be borne in mind by a researcher seeking to have his or her work published. By addressing ten broad questions reflecting common concerns,…

This report begins by examining the educational legislation governing the special technical schools for librarianship and information and documentation in West Germany, with emphasis on the practical approach implicit in the statutory requirements. The theoretically-grounded, practically-oriented program at the Gesellschaft fur Information und…

Reviews different structures and techniques of knowledge representation: structure of database records and files, data structures in computer programming, syntatic and semantic structure of natural language, knowledge representation in artificial intelligence, and models of human memory. A prototype expert system that makes use of some of these…

Educational dissemination has contributed a number of innovative concepts and strategies to information science. Much-misunderstood ERIC, which combines research reports with policy documents and teaching materials, is one of the first and best examples of a field-oriented rather than discipline-oriented database. Building on ERIC, federal…

This paper highlights potential benefits and more pressing social and legal problems facing Latin American nations in the area of informatics and small computers. Discussion covers potential uses (education, office applications, agriculture, national planning); role of central governments; implications for economic development; and transborder…

An information society is one in which the expression "to earn one's daily bread by the sweat of one's brow" appears decidedly anachronistic. People have been seduced by the rhetoric of novelty and confused by the surface significance of terms which have become accepted parts of everyday speech. What do rubrics such as information society,…

Written in German, this report summarizes a workshop on teaching and research activities in information science that was held at the City University, London, and attended by faculty and students from the university's Department of Information Science and H.-R. Simon of the GID (Gesellschaft fur Information und Dokumentation), Frankfort am Main,…

This two-part article outlines the provisions and limitations of the positivist and phenomenologist views of information science and describes the United Kingdom (UK) Education Management Information Exchange (EMIE), a 4-year experimental project aimed at developing and testing a range of information services for education officers and advisors in…

A cadre of thinkers called cognitive scientists has been investigating some of the same issues that first possessed the Greeks. As did the Greeks, they seek to understand what is known, ponder the sources of knowledge, conjecture about the various vehicles of knowledge, reflect on language, and speculate on the nature of the activity of knowing.…