Discusses the influence of personality traits and approaches to studying on students' information-seeking behavior, with a specific focus on use of information technology. Three information-seeking patterns emerged from analyses of 305 college students: "Fast Surfers,""Broad Scanners," and "Deep Divers." Findings…

Reports on the human factors considered in the design and implementation of a digital museum for historic costume. Starting with an elicitation and analysis of the qualitative and functional needs of its users, an evolutionary prototype was developed for a model of digital archiving that delivers a gratifying Web experience, visually and…

Details the rationale, evaluation and implementation of use scenarios-structured narrative descriptions of envisioned system use-in the development of the Alexandria Digital Earth Prototype (ADEPT). Discusses the strengths of the scenario approach, obstacles to their use, and lessons learned in the overall development process. (Author/AEF)

Discusses qualitatively enhanced access to data collections, requiring a more meaningful interface which endows the users with personal agents that are adaptable to the users' individual retrieval preferences. Users are given recommendations derived from best practice in information search processes to perform successful retrieval activities via…

Develops a framework explaining the need to disambiguate user inquiries to improve information systems and services. Categorizes a set of questions according to ambiguity type. Discusses three aspects of retrieval systems and services, based on results of categorization: increasing user input to make initial queries less ambiguous; reducing search…

Tests the use of questions as a technique in the query specification process. Using a within-subjects design, 48 people interacted with a modified Google interface to solve four information problems in four domains. Half the tasks were entered as typical keyword queries, and half as questions or statements. Results suggest the typical search box…

Reports findings from a study examining the nature of queries submitted to Ask Jeeves-a publicly accessible question and answer search engine. Some 30,000 queries from a dataset of 800,000, or 3.75%, were analyzed. Results include: many queries not in question format; four types of user queries: keyword, Boolean, question, and request; and common…

Describes the Statistical Interactive Glossary (SIG), an enhanced glossary of statistical terms supported by the GovStat ontology of statistical concepts. Presents a conceptual framework whose components articulate different aspects of a term's basic explanation that can be manipulated to produce a variety of presentations. The overarching…

Proposes a mechanism that carefully integrates human and machine efforts to explore Web users' search interests. The approach consists of a four-step process: extraction of core terms; construction of subject taxonomy; automatic subject categorization of query terms; and observation of users' search interests. Research findings are proved valuable…

Describes a research project designed to provide baseline data on the relationship between people's use of the public library and use of the Internet. A national survey was conducted to estimate the number of people using the library, the Internet, both, or neither, and to describe behaviors of people in each segment related to use or nonuse of…

Reports on an exploratory case study of intermediation in a hospital digital library information service. Focuses on intermediation where user-intermediary communications were conducted through an asynchronous text-based digital medium. Contributions of the study are evidenced in a descriptive framework of nine categories of factors perceived as…

Reports a case study of Taiwan Power Company on the perceived difference between information technology professionals and information systems users. Findings indicated there are significant differences regarding the required skill sets of system analysts and the expected role playing of system analysts, and no significant difference regarding the…

Outlines a study to develop methods to assess the quality of digital reference services, test and refine measures and quality standards to describe digital reference services, and to produce a guidebook that describes how to collect and report data for these measures and standards. (Author/AEF)

The Naval Research Laboratory Library has made significant progress providing its distributed user community with a single point-of-access to information needed to support scientific research through TORPEDO "Ultra," a digital archive that in many respects functions as an electronic counterpart of a traditional library. It consists of…

Describes research that consists of: development of a taxonomy of development of: IR tasks based on real users, a taxonomy of IR strategies that are general across different IR systems, a descriptive model of expert performance, a prescriptive model of effective performance, and design and evaluation of a pedagogical approach to teach the…