Chronicles the variety of means with which the novelist Michael Crichton has attempted to give his works the appearance of nonfiction. Specific and successful techniques utilized in "Eaters of the Dead" are noted, and the resulting erroneous classifications by the Library of Congress and subsequent catalogers are discussed. (Author)

Discusses interoperability as a key challenge to digital libraries and describes efforts of the Open Archives initiative (formerly Universal Preprint Service initiative) to develop an open architecture that supports simultaneous searching and retrieval of papers from disparate archives. Highlights include scientific information and journal…

Discusses how to increase user satisfaction by designing information retrieval systems that inform the user while the user is interacting online. Models the information processing operations of a user who has received an information message from the system and is stimulated into grasping at a higher understanding of the information need. (Contains…

Uses Kintsch's proposition-based construction-integration theory of discourse comprehension to detail the user coding operations that occur in each of the three subsystems (Perception, Comprehension, Application) in which users process an information retrieval systems (IRS) message. Describes an IRS device made up of two separate parts that enable…

Discusses information retrieval and the use of binary trees as a fast access method for search strategies such as hashing. Proposes new methods based on compact binary trees that provide faster access and more compact storage, explains the theoretical basis, and confirms the validity of the methods through empirical observations. (LRW)

Describes the Accomplishment-Based Curriculum Development model, which provide a cohesive framework for the processes of human performance technology and instructional design. Topics include front-end analysis; behavior characteristics; information storage and retrieval; materials development; and the contributions of Joe Harless to the field.…

An n-gram is a string of characters, usually adjacent, extracted from a section of continuous text that can be used in spelling error detection and correction, query expansion, information retrieval, dictionary search, text compression, and language identification applications. This article provides an introduction to the use of n-grams in textual…

Examines various kinds of uncertainty in information science. The notion of ambiguity is defined and contrasted with the more familiar notions of randomness and vagueness. Functional forms resistant to ambiguity are defined, and it is shown how to incorporate a random component, that is itself also resistant to ambiguity, into a resilient, but…

Investigates information retrieval from hypertext on the World Wide Web. Significant main and interaction effects were found for both link density (number of links per display) and display format (paragraphs or lists) on search performance. Low link densities displayed in list format produced the best overall results. Expert browsers performed…

Presents an approach for dynamic database integration and query processing in the absence of information about attribute correspondences and global IDs. Defines different types of equivalence conditions for the construction of global IDs. Proposes a strategy based on ranked role-sets that makes use of an automated semantic integration procedure…

Presents a heuristic, attribute-based, noise-tolerant data mining program, HCV (Version 2.0) based on the newly-developed extension matrix approach. Outlines some techniques implemented in the HCV program for noise handling and discretization of continuous domains; an empirical comparison shows that rules generated by HCV are more compact than the…

Reports on an investigation which utilized multidimensional scaling (MDS) of paired comparison judgments as a means of evaluating representations for moving image documents. Discusses implications of the findings for visual information retrieval and the development of digital video collections. (Author/AEF)

This research is concerned with reusing texts produced by audio describers as a source for automatically deriving shot-level indexing for film and video products. Results reinforce the notion that audio description is not sufficient on its own as a source for generating an index to the image, but it is valuable because it describes what is going…

Discussion of terms and how they are used in queries in information retrieval focuses on a transaction log analysis of queries posed on an Internet search service that isolated basic query structure syntactic patterns. Describes a linguistic model that classified Web queries and suggests implications for information retrieval system design.…

Presents a session abstract that included speakers discussing current studies in successive searching during the information seeking process. Highlights include mediated successive searching; end-user successive searching; designing information retrieval systems to support successive searching; and search histories for user support in legal…