Reports the results of part one of a multi-faceted research project investigating children's information-seeking behavior in using World Wide Web search engines, with reference to Yahooligans. Examines search processes, patterns of exploration of returned results, success in finding/retrieving relevant information, persistence in finding…

Lists information storage and retrieval devices as a representation of improvements and changes throughout the past several millennia. Examines characteristics of past and present devices and identifies those characteristics that are important for carrying into the future. Discusses implications for information centers striving to provide…

Offers a novel exploration of students' use of three Internet functions (information retrieval, information giving, and conversation capabilities) in the context of the use of other communication media. Demonstrates that the Internet is a multidimensional technology used in a manner similar to other, more traditional media. (SC)

Four types of video surrogates were compared under two tasks. Multidimensional scaling was used to map dimensional dispersions of users' judgments of similarity between videos and surrogates. Congruence between these maps was used to evaluate representativeness of each surrogate type. Congruence was greater for image-based than for text-based…

Describes the design and implementation of a system for creating highlight abstracts to select relevant online magazine articles. Explains parsing texts based on text grammar and extracting sentences and statements that are relevant for inclusion in the abstract; and discusses knowledge representation and the importance of discourse structures in…

Investigates end-users' queries by comparing the features of the queries to those identified in previous. Participants, 29 college students majoring in art history, were required to finish a term paper including at least 20 images. Participants' image queries were collected by pre- and post-search questionnaires, and three human reviewers mapped…

Discussion of scholarly Web pages that are not accessible through standard search engines focuses on the development of automatic extraction techniques that combine lexical and syntactic analyses with heuristics. Topics include information analysis and extraction techniques; citation standards; publication index Web pages; and performance…

Proposes a mining process to automate author co-citation analysis based on the Web Citation Database, a data warehouse for storing citation indices of Web publications. Describes the use of agglomerative hierarchical clustering for author clustering and multidimensional scaling for displaying author cluster maps, and explains PubSearch, a…

Presents both theoretical and technical bases on which to build a "science of text visualization." The Spatial Paradigm for Information Retrieval and Exploration (SPIRE) text-visualization system, which images information from free-text documents as natural terrains, serves as an example of the "ecological approach" in its visual metaphor, its…

Reviews template mining research and shows how templates are used in World Wide Web search engines and metasearch engines for helping end-users generate natural language search expressions. Potential areas of application of template mining for extraction of information from digital documents are highlighted, and how such applications are used is…

Describes a system called CINDI (Concordia INdexing and DIscovery System) for cataloging and searching documents in a distributed virtual library. The document author registers metadata in the form of a semantic header that contains information on syntactic and semantic content, and an expert system fills the semantic header according to accepted…

Provides a basic definition of metadata, including the usefulness of metatags for online information retrieval and documentation. Defines the elements of the Dublin Core, the next level of metadata. Discusses how librarians can take advantage of metadata. Describes the Gateway to Educational Materials (GEM) Project whose goal is to use metadata to…

Discusses how to make the best choices for converting journals retrospectively to digital and online format. Results indicated that differences exist between the two disciplines examined--ecology and biochemistry--in the ages of literature used. Discusses possible screening methods before doing an extensive citation analysis of a discipline's…

Describes a model of information seeking/retrieval in which the user's quest is seen as a generalized abstract "response function" representing the user's response to the information delivered by the system. The concept of an information quest, "Q," is illustrated with data collected in the Ant World Project at Rutgers…

Researchers from the University of Washington, Microsoft Research, Boeing, and Risoe National Laboratory in Denmark have embarked on a project to explore the manifestations of Collaborative Information Retrieval (CIR) in work settings and to propose technological innovations and organizational changes that can support, facilitate, and improve CIR.…