Reports on the 89th Annual Special Libraries Association Conference. Provides an overview of the general and regular sessions and examines Internet search engines and other tools; news sites in Australia, Canada, Latin America, and the United Kingdom; search strategies; evaluation of search engines; access to electronic information; research on…

Initially available from universities and individual enthusiasts, software tools to author World Wide Web pages are maturing into very feature-rich applications and are now offered by large corporations. These applications are enabling more companies to create and maintain pages themselves on the Web or on corporate Intranets. The market continues…

This paper proposes an automated, third party World Wide Web (WWW)-based evaluation service (i.e., an online questionnaire) that focuses on usability issues of WWW-based courseware and can be used by any WWW course instructor/student. Requirements related to the usability of educational systems are summarized, including the learning environment,…

Discusses an evaluation of WebCT (Web Course Tools) in practice at University of New South Wales (Australia) to assess the accessibility of WebCT for people with sensory, cognitive, and physical disabilities. Topics include evaluation methodology; learner-centered courseware design model; course evaluation by students; staff perceptions; and…

Almost overnight, the World Wide Web has made the solution of "classic" information retrieval problems a pressing commercial goal. The various information retrieval solutions being offered on the Web are quite familiar to the librarian. The various Web search sites make use of "traditional" inverted indexes, manual indexing,…

The specific characteristics of the World Wide Web mean that publishing documents using this medium has a number of unique requirements and presents a different challenge to anyone wishing to put documents on the Web. Key issues which have to be resolved include determining the nature of the documents to be published, identifying whether documents…

The move by training and educational institutions in Australia toward the use of multimedia to facilitate effective and cost effective training and professional development has grown at a substantial pace. This paper focuses on the impact of multimedia on the areas of training and professional development. Benefits of the technology are described,…

This paper reports the results of a study of the development of an innovative learning element designed to be implemented in a computer-facilitated learning (CFL) module. The learning element is an open-ended, short answer, text question tool (TQT) designed to be used in World Wide Web-based courses or incorporated into hybrid Web/CD-ROM systems.…

This paper presents the outcome of research that deals with the development and use of World Wide Web hypermedia courseware in student teachers' education in the Department of Information Science at the Faculty of Philosophy, University of Rijeka (Croatia). The purpose of this research is to explore how the use of Web courseware improves the…

This paper presents the results of an experiment using videoconferencing in a distance graduate course in the Computer Science Department at the Catholic University of Rio de Janeiro (Brazil). The purpose of the experiment was to test two videoconference technologies that are widely used on the Internet, Cu-SeeMe and Real technology, and to assess…

This paper describes Coconuts (Concurrent Collaborative Learning Environment Supported by Awareness), a proposed module of Sharlok (Sharing, Linking and Looking-for Knowledge), an open-ended and collaborative learning environment that integrates a knowledge building tool with a collaborative interface tool. Coconuts was developed in order to…