Explores the information processes and work situations of interdisciplinary scientists, focusing on structural and strategic elements of information exchange between intellectual domains. Interview data reveal that scientists undertake individual and cooperative boundary-crossing research. Four research modes are identified and associated with…

Discusses a multidisciplinary workshop that addressed issues concerning internationally distributed information networks. Highlights include multilingual information access in media other than character-coded text; cross-language information retrieval and multilingual metadata; and evaluation of multilingual systems. (LRW)

Explores the utility of using prior domain knowledge (in the form of taxonomies over attributes, attribute values and concept classes) to constrain the rule learner's search by requiring it to be consistent with what is already known about the domain. Spreading Activation Learning (SAL) is used to efficiently learn over taxonomically structured…

Shape Recovery Analysis (SHERA), a new visual analytical technique, is applied to the N-Gram hypothesis on matched Japanese-English technical documents. Results reveal compaction in the translation of Japanese subject terms to English subject terms. The biagram approach to the Japanese data yields a remarkable similarity to the matching visualized…

"MedLine Search Assistant" is a new interface for MEDLINE searching that improves both search precision and recall by helping the user convert a free text search to a controlled vocabulary-based search in a visual environment. Features of the interface are described, followed by details of the conceptual design and the physical design of…

Reviews the characteristics of the Cheshire II system that is being used to implement full-text and fielded searching of bibliographic information for the University of California Berkeley Digital Library Initiative. Examines its performance when applied to a collection of large full-text documents in the TREC Interactive Retrieval Track and its…

Examines visual information needs as expressed in users' Web image queries; the data set consisted of 1,025,908 sequential queries from 211,058 users of EXCITE, a major Internet search service. Provides data on: image queries, image search sessions, and image terms. Discusses implications for the development of models for visual information…

Describes UKOLN's (United Kingdom Office for Library and Information Networking--a national center for support in network information management in the library/information communities) experimental system that allows digital object identifiers (DOIs) encoded as uniform resource names (URNs) to be resolved on behalf of Web browsers by Squid, a…

Explores the potential impact of imposed query, a new model of information-seeking behavior, on current approaches to library service and system evaluation. Discusses reference service evaluation, user studies, output measures, and relevance as an evaluation tool. Argues that imposed query broadens understanding of the user and of the role that…

Examines the usefulness of the Eisenberg-Berkowitz Information Problem-Solving model as a categorization for academic reference encounters. Major trends in the data include a high proportion of questions about location and access of sources, lack of synthesis or production activities, and consistent presence of system problems that impede the…

A semantic analysis of the "Weekly Subject Index Stop Word List" of "Current Contents" of the Institute for Scientific Information (ISI) and the full-stop word and semi-stop word lists of the Permuterm Subject Index of "Science Citation Index" was conducted. Emphasizes the necessity of an improved, semantically-oriented policy in preparing lists…

An increased publication rate has given rise to an increased dependence on indexing services for tracking and retrieving relevant literature. Discusses the problems associated with the fact that most computer databases encompass literature from the past 20 to 27 years. (DDR)

Reviews and discusses critically the development during the last decade of the cognitive approach to information retrieval research and theory. The focus is analytic and empirical research on the complex nature of information need formation and situation, their inherent association with the concept of relevance, and the development of cognitive…

In this study, the author investigated the ethical perceptions of business majors and music business majors from a private university and observed whether the taking of a business ethics course affected students' perceptions regarding the ethical aspects of downloading, sharing, copying, and selling copyrighted music from Internet and non-Internet…

User studies have been conducted for many years in the information and library science fields. In the archival world, this phenomenon has not been as common and less emphasis has been placed on collecting and studying the user's perspective in general. However, there are studies showing the "use" of these types of studies, particularly in the…