Information literacy is an essential skill for business communication students. Traditionally taught by librarians, there is a pressing need for all business instructors to incorporate informational literacy training into their courses. Moreover, students need to hone their research skills, moving beyond a dependence on Google and Wikipedia. This…

This article features the University of Liverpool's arts and humanities library, which applies a new search tool to improve the user experience. In nearly every way imaginable, the Sydney Jones Library and the Harold Cohen Library--the university's two libraries that serve science, engineering, and medical students--support the lives of their…

This article describes the Project Lefty, a search system that, at a minimum, adds a layer on top of traditional federated search tools that will make the wait for results more worthwhile for researchers. At best, Project Lefty improves search queries and relevance rankings for web-scale discovery tools to make the results themselves more relevant…

The authors describe how content-based multimedia search technologies can be used to help learners find new materials and learning pathways by identifying semantic relationships between educational resources in a social learning network. This helps users--both learners and educators--to explore and find material to support their learning aims.…

Medical and health sciences libraries have incorporated the elements of evidence-based practice (EBP) into their reference services, instruction, and online resource development for years. While EBP focuses on the use of medical and health sciences literature in the clinical environment (i.e., making decisions about how to treat a particular…

That little rectangle with a button next to it? (Those things called search boxes but might just as well be called "resource drains.") Imagine it disappearing from a library's webpages. The intricate works behind these design elements make up a major portion of what library staff spends time and money developing, populating, supporting,…

The recent introduction of Google Scholar has renewed hope that someday a powerful research tool will bring continuing education literature more quickly, freely, and completely to one's computer. The authors suggest that using Google Scholar with other traditional search methods will narrow the research gap between what is discoverable and…

Personalization of user interfaces for browsing content is a key concept to ensure content accessibility. In this direction, we introduce concepts that result in the generation of personalized multimodal user interfaces for browsing XML content. User requirements concerning the browsing of a specific content type can be specified by means of…

Internet search has become a routine computing activity, with regular visits to a search engine--usually Google--the norm for most people. The vast majority of searchers, as recent studies of Internet search behavior reveal, search only in the most basic of ways and fail to avail themselves of options that could easily and effortlessly improve…

Describes how an electronic greeting card Web site, Egreetings, redesigned the site to improve the number of greetings sent by users. Goals included reorganizing the card collection, including taxonomy and controlled vocabulary; improving navigation and searching; placing ads and promotions; developing a music greeting collection; and improving…

This paper presents the most important concepts and techniques to use in successfully searching the major World Wide Web search engines and directories, explains the basics of how search engines work, and describes what is included in their indexes. Following an introduction that gives an overview of Web directories and search engines, the first…

Describes a management system developed by BT Laboratories (United Kingdom) that is based on ISO 9001 using the World Wide Web, a hypermedia system, and part of the Internet. Subject matter is presented as an alphabetical list of linked entries, numerous navigational techniques are available, and searching options function within an index file.…

This article features the New York Public Library's (NYPL) recently opened Digital Gallery. Containing more than 275,000 images digitized from primary sources and printed rarities, the Digital Gallery offers unparalleled access to the past for educators and interested visitors alike. Organization and navigation present a challenge with any…

Discusses dictionaries in digital form and describes a new type of structured, interactive hyper-dictionary that connects user learning activities with corresponding queries that express information wishes. Topics include dictionaries as knowledge acquisition support tools; searching; browsing; self-assessment though knowledge representation; and…

This paper reports on an ongoing work in designing and developing a personalised search tool for teachers' online searching using Google search engine (repository) for the implementation and testing of the first research prototype.