This article compares three self-developed subject guides and one commercial online subject guide (LibGuides) to provide information to other institutions which have a plan or are in the process of developing a plan to implement similar services to support online, distance and traditional education. This is a comparison of the current subject…

Even in the age of Google, digital repositories can add tremendous value to an institution. Yet creating and maintaining these collections is no small task. Digital repository advocates will concede that the challenges in building and maintaining these collections can daunt even the most intrepid supporters. Three repository directors share their…

Digital library is commonly seen as a type of information retrieval system which stores and accesses digital content remotely via computer networks. However, the vision of digital libraries is not limited to technology or management, but user experience. This book is an attempt to share the practical experiences of solutions to the operation of…

The difference between pertinence and relevance is discussed. Other pairs of terms and the differences between their members are examined, and the suggestion is made that such studies could increase our understanding of the theory of information systems, and thence lead to practical improvements. (Author)

It would be very helpful in retrieval experiments if good retrieval performance for a test collection was known, so that performance for particular devices could be fully evaluated. This paper presents one performance yardstick, based on optimally weighted request terms, and illustrates its application to different test collections. (Author)

Term relevance weighting systems in interactive information retrieval are reviewed. An experiment in which information retrieval users ranked query terms in decreasing order of presumed importance prior to actual search and retrieval is described. (Author/KP)

Farradane's relational indexing appeared applicable to the scientific area of the properties of metals and gave good results with a greater depth of indexing. (Author/PF)

Entropies of surrogates such as citations, abstracts, first paragraphs, last paragraphs, and first and last paragraphs are measures of how well each class of surrogates predicts relevancy of documents. They are measures of meaningful information in the text of surrogates. Such measures of information are important to information system designers.…

The Marczewski-Steinhaus metric provides what appears to be an objective general measure of retrieval effectiveness within the framework of set theory and the theory of metric spaces. (19 references) (Author/SJ)

The use of Boolean not" logic in selective dissemination of information produced greater user satisfaction, less nonpertinent information, and no apparent decrease in the number of pertinent retrievals. (9 references) (SJ)

The author distinguished between relevance and pertinence as applied to information retrieval. (6 references) (SJ)

Presents a genetic relevance optimization process performed in an information retrieval system that uses genetic techniques for solving multimodal problems (niching) and query reformulation techniques. Explains that the niching technique allows the process to reach different relevance regions of the document space, and that query reformulations…

Discussion of semantic networks and ranked retrieval focuses on two models, the semantic network model with spreading activation and the vector space model with dot product. Suggests a formal method to analyze the two models in terms of their relative performance in the same universe of objects. (Author/LRW)

Presents a new concept-based method to analyze the text characteristics of documents at varying relevance levels. Applies the results of the document analysis in an experiment on query expansion in a probabilistic information retrieval system and investigates statistical differences in textual characteristics of highly relevant and less relevant…