The Handle System is a distributed computer system that stores names, or handles, of digital items and can quickly resolve those names into the information necessary to locate and access the items. It was designed by the Corporation for National Research Initiatives as a general purpose global system for the reliable management of information on…

On2broker provides brokering services to improve access to heterogeneous, distributed, and semistructured information sources as they are presented in the World Wide Web. It relies on the use of ontologies to make explicit the semantics of Web pages. This paper discusses the general architecture and main components (i.e., query engine, information…

The Nonprofit Program Classification System being developed by the National Center for Charitable Statistics (NCCS) provides a way to enrich the information available on nonprofits and utilize the newly available NCCS/PRI National Nonprofit Organization database from the IRS Forms 990 filed annually by charities. It provides a method to organize…

As the use of the Web is perceived to be an effective tool for dissemination of research findings for the provision of asynchronous instruction, the issue of accessibility of Web page information will become more and more relevant. The World Wide Web consortium (W3C) has recognized a disparity in accessibility to the Web between persons with and…

A framework for the design of multi-channel (MC) applications in the cultural tourism domain is presented. Several heterogeneous interface devices are supported including location-sensitive mobile units, on-site stationary devices, and personalized CDs that extend the on-site experience beyond the visit time thanks to personal memories gathered…

Almost all work on music information retrieval to date has concentrated on music in the audio and event (normally MIDI) domains. However, music in the form of notation, especially Conventional Music Notation (CMN), is of much interest to musically trained persons, both amateurs and professionals, and searching CMN has great value for digital music…

At the center of hypertext is the link, an active connection from part of one document to another document (or part of that document). In the early days of the World Wide Web, it was easy for readers to identify the links on the page: the unvisited links appeared in blue and underlined, the visited links appeared in red or purple and underlined.…

Law is grounded in the past, in the decisions and reasoning of generations of lawyers, judges, juries, and professors. Ready access to this history is vital to solid legal research, and yet, until 2000, much of it was buried in vast collections of aging paper journals. HeinOnline is a new online archive of law journals. Development of HeinOnline…

This paper presents the results of a three-year project of the 22 libraries of the California State University (CSU) system to create an entirely new approach to information access. The Unified Information Access System (UIAS) is designed to provide integrated, single-search access to the full range of library information resources. In addition to…

Presents a new technique for information access based on a combination of Geographic Information Systems (GIS) and conceptual structures as modeled in relational concept analysis. Describes a graphical interface that allows access of spatial, hierarchical, and linear data in a common manner; discusses its features and limits. (Author/AEF)

Suggests that a faceted thesaurus should be used as the basis for organizing a small-scale institutional Web site. Contends that a faceted approach to knowledge organization can make the process of organization less random and more manageable. Reports on an informal survey of three Web sites, underscoring the problems of organization that can…

The Informedia Project at Carnegie Mellon University has created a multi-terabyte digital video library consisting of thousands of hours of video, segmented into over 50,000 stories, or documents. Since Informedia's inception in 1994, numerous interfaces have been developed and tested for accessing this library, including work on multimedia…

Evaluates Web sites representing businesses in 11 countries in East and Central Europe (ECE) by taking a stance of the Western business user. Findings indicate that the ECE business Web is showing a capability of survival usability, while lacking for the most part more competitive usability. (Author/AEF)

Usability tests were conducted on different corporate library Web sites, within the same company but based in three different countries, as part of efforts to build a global library portal site for a large high tech company. Results addressed factors influencing the success rates on the Web sites, user perceptions of usability of the sites, and…

This paper describes the techniques for implementing a full-screen, custom SPIRES interface for a public-use library database. The database-independent protocol that controls the system is described in detail. Source code for an entire working application using this interface is included. The protocol, with less than 170 lines of procedural code,…