The ERIC and LISA (Library and Information Science Abstracts) databases are compared through a literature review and the analysis of an online search on a topic in librarianship. ERIC emphasizes education and includes serials, monographs, collections, and research reports for their coverage of some aspect of education. LISA is dedicated to topics…

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…

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…

A study investigated the relationship between the completeness of end users' mental models of an online system and their ability to use the system effectively. Although all of the study subjects were relatively successful, those with more complete mental models tended to have better search results than subjects with incomplete or poor mental…