As individuals become more and more comfortable mediating all kinds of situations online and through various technologies, their virtual selves increasingly overlap their "real" lives. Posting a "happy birthday!" message on Facebook is as automatic as dropping a card in the mail. E-mailing relevant links to co-workers happens as naturally as…

This study investigates the relationships between the use of a zoom tool, the terms they supply to describe the image, and the type of image being viewed. Participants were assigned to two groups, one with access to the tool and one without, and were asked to supply terms to describe forty images, divided into four categories: landscape, portrait,…

Describes a study that investigated the use of a natural language processing technique called noun phrasing to determine whether it is a viable technique for medical information retrieval. Evaluates four noun phrase generation tools for their ability to isolate noun phrases from medical journal abstracts, focusing on precision and recall.…

Shows how XML is applied to digital library systems. Compares major features of XML with those of HTML and describes an experimental XML-based metadata retrieval system, which is based on the Dublin Core and is designed as a subsystem of the Korean Virtual Library and Information System (VINIS). (Author/LRW)

This paper describes experiences in gathering together metadata from heterogeneous sources for the American Memory project of the Library of Congress, particularly for the collections digitized and cataloged at other institutions. It also reflects on several initiatives to develop rich structured metadata schemes for specific domains and to find…

Assesses the publication impact of a digital library of aerospace scientific and technical information through usage statistics and citation analysis. Examines the Langley Technical Report Server available on the World Wide Web, compares usage with the hardcopy distribution center, and suggests retrieval analysis as a complementary metric to…

The Economic Bulletin Board (EBB), a one-stop site for economic statistics and government-sponsored business information, can be accessed on the World Wide Web, gopher, telnet, file transfer protocol, dial-up, and fax. Each access method has advantages and disadvantages related to connections, pricing, depth of access, retrieval, and system…

Includes six articles that discuss a digital library for astronomy; comparing evaluations of digital collection efforts; cross-organizational access management of Web-based resources; searching scientific bibliographic databases based on content-based relations between documents; semantics-sensitive retrieval for digital picture libraries; and…