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…

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…

Presents a method for identifying indexing terms from word stems, using discriminant analysis to distinguish terms which refer to topics from terms which do not refer to topics. A test of the method on the Harris Survey Question database is discussed. Included are 11 data tables and a reference list. (Author/JL)

Describes the creation of a prototype CD-ROM disc at the Earth Science Information Center (ESIC) that contained information on aerial photographs formerly held on computer output microfiche. Specifications are discussed, fields of information that were indexed are described, search and retrieval display capabilities are explained, and the results…

The study was conducted to gather information to assist Research Coordinating Units (RCU's) to develop information dissemination procedures. Questionnaires regarding procedures for indexing and retrieving information, which included 10 questions to be answered "yes", "no", or "plan to" and three open-ended items, were sent to the RCU's. Returns…

Describes a study that compared two information retrieval systems on a full-text medical database: one featured concept-based automatic indexing and statistical retrieval techniques, and the second used traditional word-based Boolean techniques. Evaluation of search results by calculating relative recall and precision is discussed, and user…