Nautical charts are an essential information resource for safe navigation. However, they are not only a useful resource for navigators; According to the International Hydrological Organization (IHO), they essentially fulfill two functions: 1) Maritime navigation, since most hydrographic services have the obligation to provide coverage of the…

Designed to provide students of information science with an introduction to British librarian Samuel Clement Bradford's 1934 findings about the scattering of information, this reader on Bradford's Law begins by discussing its use in calculating search procedures in printed bibliographies as well as in databases. The following additional materials…

An unprecedented amount of information encompassing almost every facet of human activities across the world is generated daily in the form of zeros and ones, and that is often the only form in which such information is recorded. A good fraction of this information needs to be preserved for periods of time ranging from a few years to centuries.…

Presents a metric for comparing the performance of common classes of Internet information retrieval tools, including human indexed catalogs of Web resources and automatically indexed databases of Web pages. The benefit of the proposed metric is that it is relevance-based, and it facilitates the comparison of the performance of different classes of…

Discussion of the information-seeking behavior of humanists focuses on a study that investigated the efficacy of following bibliographic references from documents already known. Topics include the nature of humanities research; vocabulary control and indexing; subject-based literature searches; seed documents; relevance; retrieval based on…

Almost overnight, the World Wide Web has made the solution of "classic" information retrieval problems a pressing commercial goal. The various information retrieval solutions being offered on the Web are quite familiar to the librarian. The various Web search sites make use of "traditional" inverted indexes, manual indexing,…

A survey of recent publications shows that frequent topics of Internet and information retrieval research are the effectiveness of search engines, information validation and quality, user studies, design of user interfaces, data structures and metadata, classification and vocabulary based aids, and indexing and search agents. The changing balance…

Reviews the development of secondary information services in the arts and humanities, discusses the services currently provided and the usage levels for those services, outlines some of the problems associated with online databases in the humanities, and considers some probable future developments. A 5-item reference list is included. (JL)

This document discusses problems and methods of language classification, especially with regard to questions of information storage and retrieval in connection with an information network for the language sciences such as that envisioned by the LINCS (Language Information Network and Clearinghouse System) Project at the Center for Applied…

State of the art access to the literature of women's history is reviewed in this paper, including the issues of publication, bibliographic control, indexing services, and electronic databases. The problems of intellectual access to women's history in online databases are discussed in terms of: (1) characteristics of the subject itself; (2)…

This manual describes the contents, purpose, and use of the Australian Education Index Database (AEII), which is produced by the Library and Information Services Unit of the Australian Council for Educational Research to provide access to Australian generated information both in published and unpublished forms. An overview of AEII is followed by…

Indexing and abstraction services in the social sciences are growing as primary sources. Results are that users become overwhelmed with the number of secondary services they use. Therefore, planning, coverage and overlap are examined in this research report with emphasis on reexamining secondary services and redefining users and users' needs.…

Developed to orient the information seeker to the computerized literature search process, this guide provides background information that will help the user facilitate the search interview and the formation of a search topic, enabling him or her to focus on personal search needs and not on the fundamentals of online searching. Major purposes for…

This core thesaurus of terms suitable for indexing Australian educational literature was developed by the Australian Council for Educational Research by means of a systematic and thorough revision of the "Thesaurus of ERIC Descriptors." Based on the actual terminology of education in Australia, this thesaurus includes: key words and…

The nature of typical mechanized data bases with which university information centers and libraries will be working is examined to provide background information for data base retrieval efforts. Format and content of the data must be taken into consideration before meaningful retrieval can be achieved. Hence both of these aspects are treated in…