Introduction: This paper reports an exploratory study examining how users participate in social tagging activities in a scholarly digital library environment to learn about their motivations, behaviour, and practices. Method: This study was conducted in two phases: a survey to investigate usage and attitudes of social tagging tool, and a…

Analyzes a study of the effect of controlled variations in indexing vocabulary size on retrieval performance, using the Cranfield 200 and 1400 test collections. Sets of variable-length character strings were tested, in an application of the Cluster Hypothesis and in a series of linear associative retrieval experiments. (Author/SW)

Presents the human evaluation of ILIAD, a program for machine-aided indexing that was designed to assist expert librarians in computer-aided indexing and document analysis. Topics include controlled indexing and free indexing; natural language and concept-based information retrieval; evaluation methodology; syntactic variations; and a comparison…

Discusses the search option on Web sites and explains how to develop a search engine. Highlights include search options, including Boolean operators, graphical interface, and language; platform and server compatibility; indexing; metadata; XML; customization options; installation and configuration; evaluation; usability; and cost. (LRW)

Examines the retrieval effectiveness of five hierarchical clustering methods (single link, complete link, group average, Ward's method, and weighted average) as a function of indexing exhaustivity with four test collections. Evaluations of retrieval effectiveness are based on three measures of optimal retrieval performance. (Author/LRW)

A measure of indexing consistency is developed based on the concept of 'fuzzy sets'. It assigns a higher consistency value if indexers agree on the more important terms than if they agree on less important terms. Measures of the quality of an indexer's work and exhaustivity of indexing are also proposed. Experimental data on indexing consistency…

Analyzes the nature of Boolean information retrieval in relation to the discrete weights of query terms, examines assigned weights from an approach involving thresholds, and generates an evaluation mechanism which allows the user to attach a threshold to the query term. Thirteen references are listed. (FM)

Describes exploratory experiments in evaluating and improving a thesaurus through studying its effect on retrieval. A formula was developed to measure the conceptual distance between queries and documents encoded as sets of thesaurus terms. Comparison to the performance of people judging conceptual distance shows that the formula accurately…

Describes the SAPHIRE (Semantic and Probabilistic Heuristic Information Retrieval Environment) that was developed to identify optimal approaches to indexing, retrieval, and evaluation of information retrieval systems in the biomedical domain. Six evaluation studies that have been done with SAPHIRE are summarized and future challenges are…

The Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) system was used to identify 1,734 documents on program evaluation methodology. Attempts to further characterize these documents by subject were only partially successful because of the lack of sufficient depth of indexing and design constraints of the computer system. Attempts to characterize…

Presents results of simulations that were conducted to test the effects of errors in estimation of individual term probabilities on the performance of a probabilistic information retrieval (PIR) system. Assigning index terms to documents is described; an information retrieval system called Helpnet is explained; and relevance, ranking, and…

Reports on a theoretical model of structured document indexing and retrieval based on the Dempster-Shafer Theory of Evidence. Highlights include passage retrieval, hypertext, relevance, information needs, implementation of the model, an evaluation scheme designed to test the model's effectiveness, and results of experiments that investigated…

Discussion of information retrieval and automatic indexing in digital libraries focuses on Chinese indexing and cross-lingual information retrieval. Investigates the combination and boundary detection approaches based on mutual information for word segmentation, using lexical and statistical information. Reports results of experiments that…

Describes EquiX, a search language for XML that combines querying with searching to query the data and the meta-data content of Web pages. Topics include search engines; a data model for XML documents; search query syntax; search query semantics; an algorithm for evaluating a query on a document; and indexing EquiX queries. (LRW)

Reviews the TREC (Text Retrieval Conference) program, considering the test results, the findings for information retrieval, and the lessons TREC offers for information retrieval evaluation. Topics include the ad hoc retrieval task; indexing models; document and query descriptions; search strategies; and the user's request as the dominant factor in…