Discussion of digital libraries focuses on the need for personalization capabilities so users can create their own personalized information environments. Highlights include material personalization; collection personalization; active reading; personalized retrieving; personalized filtering; and a prototype system. (LRW)

Reading and synthesizing medical journals for possible research trajectories is but a single example of the innovations that are transforming science and technology. These innovations are the direct result of a complex combination of forces at work in a new environment, encompassing education, research, opportunity, challenge, ingenuity,…

It is known that any totally skew quantity with (n + 1) indices, each of which ranges over n values, vanishes identically. The aim of this short note is to show that this is equivalent to the simple fact that any (n + 1) vectors in an n-dimensional vector space are linearly dependent.

Identifying academic misdemeanours and actual applied effort in student assessments involving practical work can be problematic. For instance, it can be difficult to assess the actual effort that a student applied, the sequence and method applied, and whether there was any form of collusion or collaboration. In this paper we propose a system of…

Individuals influence each others' decisions about cultural products such as songs, books, and movies; but to what extent can the perception of success become a "self-fulfilling prophecy"? We have explored this question experimentally by artificially inverting the true popularity of songs in an online "music market," in which 12,207 participants…

Purpose: This paper seeks to report selective findings of a wider study to identify the mechanisms that end users employ to overcome their information seeking failure on the web. Design/methodology/approach: Data collection was conducted by semi-structured and in-depth interviews. The study adopted a qualitative approach and was carried out based…

Correct spelling is increasingly important in our technological world. We examined children's and adults' Web search behavior for easy and more difficult to spell target keywords. Grade 4 children and university students searched for the life cycle of the lemming (easy to spell target keyword) or the ptarmigan (difficult to spell target keyword).…

In the late 1990s the Archives of Ontario adopted a version of the Australian "series system" for the arrangement of Government of Ontario records. Series-based systems of arrangement and description provide an alternative means for archives to represent the relationships between a body of records, the functions and activities that…

The aim of the present study was to investigate whether costs invoked by the presence of an irrelevant singleton distractor in a visual search task are due to attentional capture by the irrelevant singleton or spatially unrelated filtering costs. Measures of spatial effects were based on distance effects, compatibility effects, and differences…

This study conducted to determine representation impact on information items retrieval in terms of precision and recall performance and overlap used the INSPEC "Computers and Control Abstracts" loaded on DIATOM, an online retrieval system based on DIALOG, as the database to be searched. Sixty-nine users provided 84 queries which were…

In Part I of the Session, Network members describe and compare their experiences in utilizing various aspects of the SUNY Retrieval System including "query" cycle, scan statements, author searches, and book files. Machine problems are discussed as well as options on charging for searches, how much information to retrieve, and serving…

Reports experiments with a term weighting model incorporating relevance information in which it is assumed that index terms are distributed dependently. It is argued that, if high recall searches are required, relevance feedback based on the modified dependence model may be superior to the Boolean search. (Author/VT)

Describes an investigation of the use of document components, such as terms, sentences, and whole documents, for indexing and retrieval. A number of probabilistic similarity measures based on document components are studied, as well as a new method of handling probability estimations involving small sample sizes. (24 references) (Author/CLB)

A theoretical framework used to derive a weighting mechanism for ranking output documents in Boolean retrieval systems is described in detail. A simple illustrative example is included, and the implications of such an approach are discussed. (64 references) (Author/CLB)

Examines online search results of sample questions in several databases covering linguistics, cultural anthropology, and physical anthropology in order to determine if and where any overlap in results might occur, and which files have greatest number of relevant hits. Search results by database are given for each subject area. (EJS)