Aligned with the 2021 AERA conference theme, which asks us as citizen-scholars to use educational research to address complex social and educational problems, the objective of this study is to provide the first nationally-representative, empirical evidence on the relationships among literacy, literacy skill use, and these information-seeking…

Sixteen scholarly papers and twenty abstracts comprise the content of the eighteenth annual Brick & Click Libraries Conference, held annually at Northwest Missouri State University in Maryville, Missouri. The proceedings, authored by academic librarians and presented at the conference, portray the contemporary and future face of librarianship.…

Learning objects (LOs) are digital or non-digital entities used for learning, education or training commonly stored in repositories searchable by their associated metadata. Unfortunately, based on the current standards, such metadata is often missing or incorrectly entered making search difficult or impossible. In this paper, we investigate…

The Information Age has been built, in part, on the belief that more information is always better. True to that sentiment, people have found ways to make a lot of information available to the masses--perhaps more than anyone ever imagined. The goal of the Semantic Web, often called Web 3.0, is for users to spend less time looking for information…

The Digital Initiatives department at Miami University, like most digital initiatives and special collections departments, has a large number of rich digital image collections, stored primarily in a third-party database. Typically, these databases are not findable to the average Web user. From a desire to expose these collections to the wider Web…

Purpose: The present paper aims to describe an approach for building the Semantic Web rules for interoperation between heterogeneous learning objects, namely course outlines from different universities, and one of the rule uses: identifying (in)compatibilities between course descriptions. Design/methodology/approach: As proof of concept, a rule…

This dissertation studies information extraction (IE), the problem of extracting structured information from unstructured data. Example IE tasks include extracting person names from news articles, product information from e-commerce Web pages, street addresses from emails, and names of emerging music bands from blogs. IE is all increasingly…

Today's students are faced with the challenge of utilizing technology to support not only their personal lives, but also their academic careers. "Technology Implementation and Teacher Education: Reflective Models" provides teachers with the resources needed to address this challenge and develop new methodologies for addressing technology in…

Many current (online) help systems fail because users refuse to use them or, even if they do so, they do not perceive them as helpful. There is an obvious gap between the intentions of the help content authors and the achievement of objectives concerning the perceived usefulness by help users. Problems may be divided into psychological and…

The challenge of the semantic web is the provision of distributed information with well-defined meaning, understandable for different parties. Particularly, applications should be able to provide individually optimized access to information by taking the individual needs and requirements of the users into account. In this paper we propose a…

Describes HTML (HyperText Markup Language) and its use on the Internet's World Wide Web, including main HTML tags and their syntaxes. Alternatives to HTML, such as Adobe's Acrobat software and Sun's new Java application language, are briefly described. (Author/LRW)

Examines Internet security risks and how users can protect themselves. Discusses inadvertent bugs in software; programming problems with Common Gateway Interface (CGI); viruses; tracking of Web users; and preventing access to selected Web pages and filtering software. A glossary of Internet security-related terms is included. (AEF)

This paper proposes a design framework for constructing Digital Rights Management (DRM) that enables learning objects in legal usage. The central theme of this framework is that any design of a DRM must have theories as foundations to make the maintenance, extension or interoperability easy. While a learning objective consists of learning…

The Internet is many things to many people. Some see the Internet as the Wild West, a yawning wilderness waiting to be tamed and cultivated. For companies like eBay, the Internet is a steady, transaction-based revenue stream. For the dot-com companies, the Internet was perceived as a California gold rush. In terms of online library programming for…

Discusses the development of electronic books and considers marketing and distribution, rights management, and technical standards. Economic and institutional relationships, copyrights, Extensible Markup Language (XML), access to content, free access versus fees, preservation versus loss of control over long-term storage and access, and trusted…