Smart spaces, or smart environments, represent the next evolutionary development in buildings, banking, homes, hospitals, transportation systems, industries, cities, and government automation. By riding the tide of sensor and event processing technologies, the smart environment captures and processes information about its surroundings as well as…

This commentary focuses on the use of the eye-tracking methodology to study cognitive processes during multimedia learning. First, some general remarks are made about how the method is applied to investigate visual information processing, followed by a reflection on the eye movement measures employed in the studies published in this special issue.…

Since its publication in 2005, Mark A. Greene and Dennis Meissner's "More Product, Less Process: Revamping Traditional Archival Processing" has led to much discussion and self-examination within the archival community about working through backlogs. This article discusses the impact of Greene and Meissner's work and considers the questions and…

This article attempts to offer an overview of the current changes that are being experienced in the management of audio-visual documentation and those that can be forecast in the future as a result of the migration from analogue to digital information. For this purpose the documentary chain will be used as a basis to analyse individually the tasks…

An investigation has been made of the suitability of Farradane's system of relational indexing as a German language indexing tool. A circular representation of Farradane's table of relations is proposed and the German version of relational indexing is presented and discussed. (12 references) (Author)

Experiments with two distinct collections, using three levels of indexing exhaustively for both documents and requests, show that substantially the same performance is obtained for very different levels of document indexing, if suitable choices are made of request level. (6 references) (Author)

The criticisms made against chain indexing are reviewed, and PRECIS briefly considered as a possible (but improbable) general substitute for indexing. The failures of chain indexing arise mainly from an overemphasis on generic relationships. The use of symbols to represent relations between terms is suggested for the chain index. (80 references)…

Proposes a new rule system and notation that supports the characterization of a document based on its structure or architecture (primarily linear, paper-copy media). Examples of the application of the notation are provided. (Author/JKP)

THE MAIN OBJECTIVES OF THE ANALYSES INCLUDE--(1) A RESEARCH STUDY OF TECHNIQUES FOR THE EVALUATION OF ASSOCIATIVE AND COORDINATE MESSAGE RETRIEVAL METHODS. (2) THE PREPARATION AND ANALYSIS OF MACHINE-READABLE TEST CORPORA SUITABLE FOR EXPERIMENTS WITH ASSOCIATIVE MESSAGE RETRIEVAL METHODS. THESE CORPORA CONSIST OF APPROXIMATELY 10,000 MESSAGES AND…

Because of an absence of theory, rules and conventions for thesaurus construction and maintenance, an investigation of how thesauri are actually updated was conducted. Two concepts crucial to any theoretical foundation of thesauri and two techniques for systematic updating of a thesaurus are presented for consideration. (46 references) (Author/KE)

There are six major studies of the effect of indexing depth on retrieval performance. They differ in purpose, methodology, measures, indexing language, field of study, and data base--nevertheless, all have found depth of indexing to have the same effect upon information retrieval. (13 references) (Author/NH)

In order to contribute to the success of several studies for automatic classification, indexing and extracting currently in progress, as well as to further the theoretical and practical understanding of textual item distributions, the development of a frequency program capable of supplying these types of information was undertaken. The program…

To index at the Defense Documentation Center (DDC), an automated system must choose single words or phrases rapidly and economically. Automation of DDC's indexing has been machine-aided from its inception. A machine-aided indexing system is described that indexes one million words of text per hour of CPU time. (22 references) (Author/SJ)

A new testing process is described. The design of the test procedure is covered in detail, and the several language processing features incorporated into the SMART system are individually evaluated. (20 references) (Author)

An operational, comprehensive, economical method for updating and correcting entries in a computerized bibliographic system is presented. The technique was developed in connection with the East African Agricultural Bibliographic Project at West Virginia University. Data modification operations are discussed as well as the limitations of the method…