New media, new knowledge practices, and concepts point to the need for greater understanding of cognitive processes underlying knowledge acquisition and generation in open informational worlds. The authors of the articles in this special issue address cognitive and instructional challenges surrounding multiple document comprehension--a…

As enormous structured, semi-structured and unstructured data are collected and archived by organizations in many realms ranging from business to health networks to government agencies, the needs for efficient yet secure inter-organization information sharing naturally arise. Unlike early information sharing approaches that only involve a small…

In various research areas, the availability of open datasets is considered as key for research and application purposes. These datasets are used as benchmarks to develop new algorithms and to compare them to other algorithms in given settings. Finding such available datasets for experimentation can be a challenging task in technology enhanced…

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.…

The Open Archives Initiative (OAI) Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (PMH) is designed to facilitate discovery of the "hidden web" of scholarly information, such as that contained in databases, finding aids, and XML documents. OAI-PMH supports standardized exchange of metadata describing items in disparate collections, of such as those…

At the sixth Dublin Core Metadata Workshop convened in Washington, DC, in November 19998, a work plan was developed to address unresolved issues in resource description. This report summarizes that work plan, highlights the progress that has been made on it and identifies a few significant projects that exemplify this progress. (AEF)

Defines virtual documents and categorizes them, roughly, on how they are created, such as using templates, from computations, as composites, and as metadata. Describes the following information retrieval problems with virtual documents: search, revisiting, authentication, reference, version control, and annotation. (AEF)

Describes efforts of three official metadata standards-setting bodies. Discusses the three categories of metadata formats; metadata registries; the Dublin Core and its relatives; several geospatial and biological metadata projects; and vocabularies/data element content. Provides a list of links to metadata projects and resources. (AEF)

The United States Congress in December 2000 appropriated funds to the Library of Congress (LC) to spearhead an effort to develop a national strategy for the preservation of digital information. LC staff scheduled a series of conversations with representatives from the technology, business, entertainment, academic, legal, archival, and library…

One of the recent innovations attempting to catalog Internet resources is a standard for resource description called the Dublin Core metadata set. Discussion includes application of library standards; development of metadata elements; ongoing refinement of the elements; and applying the Dublin Core. (AEF)

Examines some of the incentives behind cataloging on the Internet. Discusses the Dublin Core metadata elements set which attempts to apply traditional cataloging practices to new technologies. Looks at the practicalities of such a system, including three obvious benefits to mapping Dublin Core elements to MARC fields. (AEF)

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…