Academic music libraries in the US collect resources to support music students and faculty in their performance and research needs. These resources include non-text items such as musical scores and recordings that are difficult to represent in standard library information systems that were built for text items. The advent of web scale discovery…

Seeking to better understand the longitudinal association between online usage of library-licensed content and short- and long-term student performance, we linked EZproxy logs to institutional university data to study how library usage impacts semester and cumulative GPAs. Panel linear mixed effects regression models indicate online library usage…

This study reports faculty experiences regarding the discovery of scholarly content, highlighting similarities and differences across a range of academic disciplines. The authors interviewed twenty-five faculty members at a public, high-research university in the Midwest to explore the intersections of discovery, browsing, and format from diverse…

Contends that large databases contain hidden knowledge, or literature that is logically linked but not bibliographically linked, that contains academically interesting commonalities not retrievable by normal searching methods. Based on search methods for discovering previously unknown causes of medical syndromes, a method for discovering new…

Reports on the Online Access to Knowledge (OAK) Project, which developed software to support end user access to a Department of Energy database based on the skill levels and needs of energy researchers. The discussion covers issues in development, evaluation, and the study of user behavior in designing an interface tailored to a special…

Suggests ways of using computers to access the periodical literature including integrated public access catalogs; natural language display; network access to area union lists; links between indexing and location tools; access to journal content through the online catalog; broadened search capabilities; and remote user access with document…

An obvious and natural approach to organizing a large corpus of data is a hierarchical index--akin to a book's table of contents. The type of corpus dealt with here is a bibliographical repository, with entries form a limited domain. Given such an index, it is desirable that search results point to relevant locations in the hierarchy, rather than…

This paper provides timesaving tips for information gathering. Part 1 presents the following tips for use of bibliographic databases: (1) read the help screens for the specific database you are using; (2) make use of the different access points and the limit features for the specific database you are using in order to focus your results; (3) learn…

Describes a study that explored differences in users' and nonusers' perceptions of the advantages and disadvantages of online bibliographic searching. The discussion covers the relationship between perceptions about online systems and decisions to use such systems, and the implications of user perceptions of benefits of online searching for user…

Humanists use a wide variety of textual, graphic, and aural materials in their research, each of which presents indexing challenges. Research into the nature of these materials and humanists' information-seeking behaviors indicate that indexing models from the sciences are not adequate. New controlled vocabulary and indexing frameworks are needed.…

Discusses information retrieval as an inherently interactive process utilizing a variety of information-seeking strategies on informational and meta-informational levels. An interface design for a bibliographic information retrieval system, called BRAQUE (BRowsing And QUEry), that supports user interactions in a two-level hypertext environment is…

This manual introduces the novice searcher to ERIC on Disc and discusses how to prepare for a search by creating a search statement; how to locate ERIC terms using the Thesaurus of ERIC Descriptors; and how to modify and limit the search using boolean logic. A computer keyboard illustration accompanies descriptions of the functions of the…

Discussion of the information-seeking behavior of humanists focuses on a study that investigated the efficacy of following bibliographic references from documents already known. Topics include the nature of humanities research; vocabulary control and indexing; subject-based literature searches; seed documents; relevance; retrieval based on…

A study investigated the relationship of medical student experience with computer searches to their continued use of search services. Results indicated that, among the 184 students studied, searching the MEDLINE database once a month through the first years of medical school improved the likelihood that students would continue searching.…

Describes an investigation of tools, techniques, and methods for the evaluation of interactive library catalogs, with emphasis on diagnostic methods and on use of the catalog in the wider context of user information-seeking behavior. A front-end system (Olive) developed to test various enhancements of traditional transaction lodging as a…