Formally describing and assessing the difficulty of learning and teaching material is important for quality assurance in university teaching, for aligning teaching and learning activities, and for easing communications among stakeholders such as teachers and students. This paper proposes a novel taxonomy to describe and quantify the difficulty…

This paper reviews indexing theory and suggests that information retrieval can be significantly improved by applying basic indexing criteria. Indexing practices are described, including the three main types of indexes: pre-coordinate, post-coordinate, and variants of both. Design features of indexes are summarized, including accuracy, consistency,…

Library classification at the Croatian library school of the Department of Information Sciences, University of Zagreb (Croatia) has an important place in the department's curriculum. This is due to the fact that classification is the most important indexing language in Croatian libraries and documentation centers and services, and its role has not…

INFOMINE is an academic virtual library containing close to 5,000 records describing and providing hypertext links to academically useful Internet resources. Creating a virtual library helps make new territories of the Internet available to others. Librarians have traditionally identified printed-form scholarly resources of value to students and…

This overview of the current capabilities of subject access in online public catalogs discusses keyword searching versus subject cataloging, users' views of the online catalog, and user-friendly versus user-hostile systems. Existing online catalogs in public and academic libraries are cited as examples. (EJS)

This is a preliminary report on an ongoing research project examining the "Current Index to Journals in Education" indexing of two major, general interest academic library journals: the "Journal of Academic Librarianship" (JAL) and "College and Research Libraries" (C&RL). The data are presented "as is,"…

Outlines the process of a CD-ROM desktop publishing project at Simmons College Graduate School of Library and Information Science. Highlights include the planning process; data generation and database development; data preparation, including data conversion and indexing; full text retrieval; assembly and production; and distribution. (three…

Describes a study of conservative and liberal journals that was conducted to determine whether academic libraries have been developing balanced collections in these areas. Issues of censorship and bias in collection development are discussed; and the influence of abstracting/indexing availability and journal age on selection are considered. (12…

A hypermedia tutoring system for teaching parasitology to college students was developed using an object oriented software development tool, Knowledge Pro. The program was designed to meet four objectives: knowledge incorporation, tutoring, indexing of key words for Boolean search, and random generation of quiz questions with instant scoring. The…

Expected Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSHs) and assigned LCSHs for 161 books requested by faculty in sociology, anthropology, and social work were compared to gauge the likely success of an online subject catalog search for those works. For 80% of the titles checked, inspection of the ninth edition of "Library of Congress Subject…

This paper evaluates the effects of using the NUDIST (Non-numerical, Unstructured Data Indexing, Searching and Theorising) computer program to organize coded, qualitative data. The use of the software is discussed within the context of the study for which it was used: an Australian study that aimed to develop a theoretical understanding of the…

Bibliographic databases act as search tools to locate relevant literature and information, but they also disseminate information about the works indexed in the records. Articles and authors that cannot be found cannot be cited, and the ability to disseminate data for that particular work is diminished. This study found no significant differences…

Describes a study that compared two information retrieval systems on a full-text medical database: one featured concept-based automatic indexing and statistical retrieval techniques, and the second used traditional word-based Boolean techniques. Evaluation of search results by calculating relative recall and precision is discussed, and user…

This paper presents an information agent and latent semantic-based indexing architecture to retrieve documents on the Internet. The system optimizes the search for documents in the Internet by automatically retrieving relevant links. The information used for the search can be obtained, for instance, from Internet browser caches and from grades of…

This paper discusses access to Asian serials (i.e., Asian and Western language titles, including publications from Asia, as well as serials about Asia produced elsewhere) in Australian libraries. Background is provided on the development of Asian collections since the 1950s. Results of a 1994 national survey of Asian materials are summarized.…