Discusses social equity issues in the information age, examines the distribution of microcomputer ownership and use across socioeconomic groups, and suggests the creation of a system of National and Regional Institutes for Information Democracy that would explore information-related empowerment issues. Experimental Mass Information Utilities…

Discussion of the growth of institutional image collections focuses on the development of a visual thesaurus to provide access to the photographic archive of the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA). Addresses specific access problems, including the accurate and rapid description of images entering collections, and searching…

Presents a formal method for making important one-shot decisions based on an elimination process which uses sequentially acquired information and is based on a conditional belief structure. The routine updating of the structure as information accumulates is based on Dempster's rule of combination. (15 references) (EAM)

Discusses problems associated with using words to describe images and describes and analyzes user generation of captions and verbal responses within a Web-based collection of 300 diverse images. Discusses issues of larger-scale analysis, implementation, and possible shifts in understanding of representation for retrieval. (Author/LRW)

Discusses results of a survey of "Interpersonal Computing and Technology: An Electronic Journal for the 21st Century" (IPCT Journal) readers. The survey gathered information on electronic publishing, including authorship, reading, credibility, availability, permanence, and limitations of electronic journals. Use of electronic surveys is…

Describes an analysis of the current microcomputer periodical literature that examined the publishing and content characteristics of the literature, the nature of the indexing, and the availability of titles. Some fundamental problems with the literature are identified and discussed. A list of 79 microcomputer periodical titles is appended. (four…

Defines the task of the Ph.D. history student in terms of information needs; reports the results of a study of Ph.D. students that observed their accessing information based on collecting names; and theorizes that collecting names induced expert thinking by mimicking the mental representation of a history expert. (Contains 90 references.)…

Provides an overview to this issue which focuses on information resources and democracy. Topics discussed include theories of democracy and the shifting information environment from an informing environment to one that is involving; the nature of information systems; censorship and economics; the content of information resources; and political…

Discusses intellectual issues involved in the indexing of visual images, postulating that the indexing of images should provide access to images based on the attributes of those images and provide access to useful groupings of images. Four categories of image attributes are described, and issues to be considered in creating groups are discussed.…

The percentage of books in a research library having personal authors that were cataloged and entered in a one-screen minicatalog was determined to be 36.6 percent when searched. Libraries can reduce cataloging costs and increase user access to information by simplifying cataloging. (AEF)

Discusses access to digital libraries on the World Wide Web via Web browsers and describes the design of a language-independent document classification system to help users of the Florida Center for Library Automation analyze search query results. Highlights include similarity scores, clustering, graphical representation of document similarity,…

Proposes the adoption of a new research paradigm that takes advantage of the digital world and may provide greater insight into how young people seek information. This involves a closer collaboration with youth as partners in constructing research and probing the different criteria of youth for determining the success of a search. (AEF)

Examines four common modalities (physical accessibility, cognitive accessibility, perceived quality, and perceived importance) underlying the complex citation practice by translation analysis. An analysis of Chinese literature in library and information science found a strong correlation between languages cited and languages translated. Highly…

Discusses indexing and access to digital resources, especially on the Internet. Topics include subject searching versus indexing; multiple terms of access; folk classification; basic level terms; folk access; Bradford's Law; Zipfian distributions; vocabulary scalability; the Resnikoff-Dolby 30:1 Rule; domain-specific indexing; and implications for…

Discussion of electronic publishing and scholarly communication provides an analytical approach for evaluating disciplinary conventions and for proposing policies about scholarly electronic publishing. Considers Internet posting as prior publication; examines publicity, access, and trustworthiness; and considers the value of peer reviewing.…