Describes a framework for building "story traces" (compact global views of a narrative) and "story projects" (selections of key elements of a narrative) and their applications in text understanding and classification. The resulting "abstract story traces" provide a compact view of the underlying narrative's key…

Presents a general overview of the development of Information Science Abstracts. The historical perspective, including the contributions of individuals and institutions, is discussed; its coverage is compared with that of other information science databases; and retrieval capabilities are described. (four references) (Author/CLB)

Grounded on object filtering, automatic indexing, and co-occurrence analysis, an experiment was performed using a parallel supercomputer to analyze over 400,000 abstracts in an INSPEC computer engineering collection. A user evaluation revealed that system-generated thesauri were better than the human-generated INSPEC subject thesaurus in concept…

Reports on the design and use of a computer system designed to assist online database searchers in determining the relevance of downloaded abstracts. The system, which runs on a personal computer, includes aids for individual review of abstracts and semiautomatic determination of relevance; prospects for fully automatic use are discussed. (CDD)

Compares "Library Literature" with "Library and Information Science Abstracts" (LISA) and outlines searching LISA on the SilverPlatter CD-ROM. Use of indexes and abstracts to aid information retrieval is explained; abstracting services are described; and five steps in writing an abstract are listed. Abstracts and annotations…

Describes Information on Demand, an information broker that provides database and manual research on a fee for service basis, and accesses more than a dozen online systems. Relative strengths and weaknesses of particular systems and the criteria used to select databases and online vendors are identified and discussed. (CLB)

Describes document acquisition, selection, indexing, and abstracting and discusses online searching of the CIS database, an online system produced by the International Occupational Safety and Health Information Centre. This database comprehensively covers information in the field of occupational health and safety. Sample searches and search…

Describes a task-oriented assessment of two MEDLINE searching systems by medical students, one using Boolean searching on human-indexed thesaurus terms and one using natural language searching on words in the title, abstract, and indexing terms. Highlights include user certainty in answering questions, time needed, and user satisfaction.…