This study focuses on differences in the scholarly search approaches of researchers and students in contemporary information environments by examining use of academic resources and elements in search results (such as title or abstract) to identify scholarly search knowledge and skills. To examine how users select documents for different search…

Master of Library and Information Studies (MLIS) students represent a population for whom literature searching is a core practice and a learning outcome for an entry-level course on information searching. How LIS students learn to find information, though, is not completely clear. Many studies have explored undergraduate searching behavior, but…

This paper explores possibilities for marrying data visualization to online archival finding aids, which have continually suffered from usability issues in their long history. This paper describes a project in which two different data visualization models were built to replace sections of an archival finding aid. Users were then shown the models,…

Online searching is a skill that all professional programs educating librarians consider an essential part of their curricula. However, investigations of online searching behavior have centered almost exclusively on end users, and there have been no recent formal studies that explore the online searching behaviors of MLIS students. In this study,…

Discovery layers provide a simplified interface for searching library resources. Libraries with limited finances make decisions about retaining indexing and abstracting databases when similar information is available in discovery layers. These decisions should be informed by student success at finding quality information as well as satisfaction…

Introduction: Use of the Internet for open Web searches is common among university students in academic learning tasks. The tools used by students to find relevant information for online assessment tasks were investigated and their information seeking behaviour was documented to explore the impact on assessment design. Method: A mixed methods…

With the advancements in the WWW and ICT, the e-learning domain has developed very fast. Even many educational institutions these days have shifted their focus towards the e-learning and mobile learning environments. However, from the quality of learning point of view, which is measured in terms of "active learning" taking place, the…

Teaching computer programming to novices is a difficult task due to the complex nature of the subject, as negative stereotypes are associated with programming and because introductory programming courses often fail to encourage student understanding. This Protocol outlines the plan that is to be followed in order to investigate the effectiveness…

Analyzed data gathered from 78 online searchers to examine attitudes toward the use of DIALOG and SDC's ORBIT command languages. It was found that most users preferred DIALOG for ease of use. Twenty sources are listed. (FM)

Reports on an experiment that examined whether thesaurus terms, related to query in a specified semantic way (synonyms, narrower terms, related terms, or broader terms) could be identified as having a more positive impact on retrieval effectiveness when added to a query through automatic query expansion. (Contains 54 references.) (Author/LRW)

Distance education created new challenges regarding the delivery of large size isochronous continuous streaming media (SM) objects. In this paper, we consider the design of a framework for customized SM presentations, where each presentation consists of a number of SM objects that should be retrieved and displayed to the user in a coherent…

Discusses the results of a survey sent to online searchers in four countries, the United Kingdom, the United States, Australia, and Canada, to investigate the influence of national culture on information retrieval skills. The survey form provided a sample question and asked searchers to prepare a preliminary search strategy in Sociological…

A self-instructional audiocassette/workbook training kit, Learn INFORM, was designed to teach new users how to search the database ABI/INFORM and to help more experienced searchers sharpen their searching skills. The 35-minute audiocassette is a dialogue between an information specialist and an end user, while the step-by-step workbook includes…

This manual is designed to assist searchers in developing cost-effective techniques for searching ABI/INFORM, a database which provides worldwide coverage of management trends, tactics, and techniques, citing articles from more than 550 business and management journals in English and other languages. ONTAP ABI/INFORM, a subset of the database, is…

This report presents the results of an experimental study which compared four different advanced retrieval methods for an online catalog to determine which are more efficient, effective, and usable. Conducted with 216 student volunteers from Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University (Virginia Tech), the study required access to data for…