Describes the "Rutgers Inventory of Machine-Readable Texts in the Humanities" that provides bibliographic information through RLIN (Research Libraries Information Network) for electronic texts in the humanities. Highlights include adaptation of MARC format; access points; search strategies; and unresolved issues in the bibliographic…

Describes a study that examined the ability of the dBase database management system to perform secondary key retrieval on multivalued data items. The results are presented as time cost relative to the number of matching records, and situations in which a different management system might be appropriate are identified. (CLB)

Describes the evolution of computerized information storage and retrieval from its mid-nineteenth century beginnings in theoretical works on logic by George Boole, to the applications of Boole's logic to switching circuits by Claude Shannon in the 1930s, to the development of coordinate indexing by Mortimer Taube in the 1940s and 1950s. (Contains…

This survey of 1037 World Wide Web objects on polymer chemistry collected by four search engines (AltaVista, Lycos, Excite, Webcrawler) examined document information and use of meta fields, images, and chemical names. Found that the use of meta fields was not widespread and that knowledge of meta fields in HTML varied among Web object creators.…

This article studies the performance of online catalog user queries involving personal names and recommends system improvements based on the results. It examines various personal name queries, the construction of bibliographic data, and subject headings. Testing done on an experimental online catalog found search tree designs to reduce system…