Senior citizens are comparatively vulnerable in accessing learning opportunities offered on the Internet due to usability problems in current web design. In an effort to build a senior-friendly learning web as a part of the Life-long Learning Network in Shanghai, usability studies of two websites currently available to Shanghai senior citizens…

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…

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…

The new trend on the Web has totally changed today's information access environment. The traditional information overload problem has evolved into the qualitative level beyond the quantitative growth. The mode of producing and consuming information is changing and we need a new paradigm for accessing information. Personalized search is one of…

The authors describe how content-based multimedia search technologies can be used to help learners find new materials and learning pathways by identifying semantic relationships between educational resources in a social learning network. This helps users--both learners and educators--to explore and find material to support their learning aims.…

Libraries spend countless hours developing websites to connect users and resources. However, how much do we really know about what website terminology and features are meaningful to our patrons? And how can we best organize websites to facilitate access to resources? This article examines these questions by presenting a case study of a…

This paper reports on a guided navigation system built on the textbook search engine developed at Anadolu University to support distance education students. The search engine uses Turkish Language specific language processing modules to enable searches over course material presented in Open Education Faculty textbooks. We implemented a guided…

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…

This paper looks at criteria on how education service providers' websites could benefit their potential students from overseas. Effective design of education website is important as web users are typically fastidious and want information fast--this serves as the background of this study. The study focuses on three selected education institutions'…

"Social Navigation" for the Web has been created as a response to the problem of disorientation in information space. It helps by visualizing traces of behavior of other users and adding social affordance to the information space. Despite the popularity of social navigation ideas, very few studies of social navigation systems can be found in the…

Personalization of user interfaces for browsing content is a key concept to ensure content accessibility. In this direction, we introduce concepts that result in the generation of personalized multimodal user interfaces for browsing XML content. User requirements concerning the browsing of a specific content type can be specified by means of…

With the rapid development of wireless communication and sensor technologies, ubiquitous learning has become a promising solution to educational problems. In context-aware ubiquitous learning environments, it is required that learning content is retrieved according to environmental contexts, such as learners' location. Also, a learning content…

This study investigates the relationships between the use of a zoom tool, the terms they supply to describe the image, and the type of image being viewed. Participants were assigned to two groups, one with access to the tool and one without, and were asked to supply terms to describe forty images, divided into four categories: landscape, portrait,…

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 need to support users of the Internet with the selection of information is becoming more important. Learners in complex, self-organising Learning Networks have similar problems and need guidance to find and select most suitable learning activities, in order to attain their lifelong learning goals in the most efficient way. Several research…