Introduction: In the big data age, we have to deal with a tremendous amount of information, which can be collected from various types of sources. For information search systems such as Web search engines or online digital libraries, the collection of documents becomes larger and larger. For some queries, an information search system needs to…

This work describes the design and construction of an open source, entity resolution system that enables users to assign and maintain persistent identifiers for master data items. Two key features of this system that are not available in current ER systems and that make persistent identification possible are (1) The capture and management of…

PubMed® is an on-line literature database hosted by the U.S. National Library of Medicine. Containing over 21 million citations for biomedical literature--both abstracts and full text--in the areas of the life sciences, behavioral studies, chemistry, and bioengineering, PubMed® represents an important tool for researchers. PubMed® searches return…

Teacher candidates have few opportunities during their teacher preparation coursework to investigate practices associated with eliciting and responding to student writing. This article describes an attempt to address this problem with a searchable online digital archive of student writing, with and without teachers' written feedback, as well…

Purpose: Presently, searching the internet for learning material relevant to ones own interest continues to be a time-consuming task. Systems that can suggest learning material (learning objects) to a learner would reduce time spent searching for material, and enable the learner to spend more time for actual learning. The purpose of this paper is…

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.…

Individuals in contact with the criminal justice system are a key population of concern to public health. Record linkage studies can be useful for studying health outcomes for this group, but the use of aliases complicates the process of linking records across databases. This study was undertaken to determine the impact of aliases on sensitivity…

Discovery tools are the next phase of library search systems. Illinois State University's Milner Library implemented EBSCO Discovery Service in August 2010. The authors conducted usability studies on the system in the fall of 2010. The aims of the study were twofold: first, to determine how Milner users set about using the system in order to…

InterBrowse, a uniform interface information retrieval application for several different databases, is designed to be used in Intermedia, a hypermedia environment currently under development at Brown University's Institute for Research Information and Scholarship. This application arose out of the recognized need for an interface that can be used…

Reviews the literature on the content aspects of database quality, specifically scope, composition, currency, accuracy, consistency, completeness, and source, journal, geographic, language, and time-period coverage. These criteria can be evaluated qualitatively and/or quantitatively to determine the profile of a database, and to ascertain search…

Outlines the features and drawbacks of Wide Area Information Servers (WAIS). Praises the ease of use for end users and the variety of documents and other information available, but cautions users about searching problems resulting from the use of relevance ranking schemes. Calls for greater librarian involvement. (EA)

Describes OAKDEC, a program based on decision-making logic that uses expert system techniques to assess the status of a database search and to provide recommendations to the user on how to proceed. The discussion focuses on the use of OAKDEC as a research tool for studying user behavior. (20 references) (Author/CLB)

Discusses the history and structure of the online database of the second edition of the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and the software tools developed at the University of Waterloo to manipulate the unusually complex database. Four sample searches that indicate some types of problems that might be encountered are appended. (DB)

Describes the University of California at Berkeley's participation in the TREC (Text Retrieval Conference) interactive track experiments. Highlights include results of searches on two systems, Cheshire II and ZPRISE; system design goals and implementation; precision and recall results; search questions by topic and system; and results of…

Discusses the results of modeling the performance of searching large text databases via various parallel hardware architectures and search algorithms. The performance under load and the cost of each configuration are compared, and a common search workload used in the modeling is described. (Contains 26 references.) (LRW)