Provides an overview of the Canadian business environment and online sources of business information. The databases described cover the following areas: directories, financial information, stock quotes, investment reports, industrial and economic information, magazines, newspapers, wire services, biographical information, and government…

Describes three groups of databases sponsored by the European Communities Commission: Eurobases, a textual database of the contents of the "Official Journal" of the European Community; the European Community Host Organization (ECHO) databases, which offer multilingual information about Europe; and statistical databases. Information on…

Describes the PADOK-II project in Germany, which was designed to give information on the effects of linguistic algorithms on retrieval in a full-text database, the German Patent Information System (GPI). Relevance assessments are discussed, statistical evaluations are described, and searches are compared for the full-text section versus the…

The European Patent Office (EPO) has recently implemented the last part of its ambitious automation project aimed at creating an automated search environment for approximately 1200 EPO patent search examiners. The examiners now have at their disposal an integrated set of tools offering a full range of functionalities from online searching, via…

Describes a system that was developed in Germany for natural language processing (NLP) to improve free text analysis for information retrieval. Techniques from empirical linguistics are discussed, system architecture is explained, and rules for dealing with conjunctions in dependency analysis for free text processing are proposed. (13 references)…

Describes the development of the Korean system for submitting electronic theses and dissertations. Highlights include standards for document formats; format conversion and processing; full-text retrieval; and multilingual database and retrieval system issues. (LRW)

Describes a project at the University of Sheffield that is investigating the use of nearest-neighbor retrieval algorithms for full-text searching. Nearest-neighbor searching is compared with Boolean retrieval and hypertext, and an experimental text retrieval system called INSTRUCT (Interactive System for Teaching Retrieval Using Computational…

Reviews strengths and weaknesses of five optical character recognition (OCR) software packages used to digitize paper documents before publishing on the Internet. Outlines options available and stages of the conversion process. Describes the learning experience of Eurotext, a United Kingdom-based electronic libraries project (eLib). (PEN)

Gives an overview of various linguistic software tools in the field of intelligent text handling that are being developed in Germany utilizing artificial intelligence techniques in the field of natural language processing. Syntactical analysis of documents is described and application areas are discussed. (10 references) (LRW)

Discusses the use of CD-ROM products in libraries and describes a full-text CD-ROM library, called the Compact Agricultural Library, that is being produced for developing nations. Topics discussed include CD-ROM and international development; making information more useable; full-text versus fielded information; editing and layout; hypertext; and…

Presents methodology and findings of an empirical study comparing local citation patterns with the holdings lists of various sources of journal articles in the United Kingdom, including the British Library. Topics include identifying data that indicates researchers' use of journals in academic libraries and identifying data to indicate journal…

A follow-up interview with librarians from Hong Kong, Mexico, Australia, Canada, and New Zealand about library automation systems in their libraries and their plans for the future. Discusses system performance, upgrades, services, resources, intranets, trends in automation, Web interfaces, full-text image/document systems, document delivery, OPACs…

This paper discusses the indexing, collection, and maintenance processes, as well as the retrieval interface, to public digital libraries. The paper begins by briefly surveying both Internet technical report collections and World Wide Web search engines. It goes on to describe a prototype digital library, the New Zealand Digital Library for…

This paper examines problems faced by visually-impaired secondary pupils in gaining access to information in print. The ever-increasing volume of information available inundates the sighted and is largely inaccessible in print format to the visually impaired. Important issues of availability for the visually impaired include whether information is…

The development of information technologies such as public access catalogs and online databases has greatly enhanced access to information. The lack of automation in the area of document delivery, however, has created a large disparity between the speed with which citations are found and the provision of primary documents. This imbalance can…