Discusses current status of professional efforts, preparedness, and use of recent findings from research to suggest management strategies and tactics for provision of information services in social sciences. Awareness of problem, characteristics of users and information needs, design aspects, models for development, and management aspects are…

Reports on a theoretical model of structured document indexing and retrieval based on the Dempster-Shafer Theory of Evidence. Highlights include passage retrieval, hypertext, relevance, information needs, implementation of the model, an evaluation scheme designed to test the model's effectiveness, and results of experiments that investigated…

Presents Checkland's soft systems methodology, discusses it in terms of the systems approach, and illustrates how it was used to relate evidence of user survey to practical problems of library management. Difficulties in using methodology are described and implications for library management and information science research are presented. (8…

Explains three cognitive models of information and the information transfer process present in the literature of library and information science, based on a linguistic analysis of phrases incorporating the word "information" from a random sample of abstracts in the LISA (Library and Information Science Abstracts) database. (17…

Discussion of the use of selective dissemination of information (SDI) focuses on a study that proposed a model for evaluating the relationship between SDI and the number of publications authored by basic research scientists working in a corporate research and development (R&D) environment. Hypotheses and their findings are presented. (Seven…

Explores creating a thesaurus from a cognitive viewpoint, based on a system that organizes its knowledge representation/classification according to the authors' and users' images of the subject domain, in order to increase user-text interaction. Discusses the general framework, methods for implementing author-text structures, and an approach…

Presents an outline of models of information seeking and other aspects of information behavior, showing the relationship between communication and information behavior in general with information seeking and information searching in information-retrieval systems. Also presents an alternative, problem-solving model which provides a basis for…

This analysis of metaphors relating to libraries in the "Chronicle of Higher Education" found that (1) administrators view libraries as contributors to the social structure of an academic environment; (2) faculty regard libraries as the repository for physical information resources to support their research; and (3) librarians attribute…