The growth in the size of the Internet has resulted in much effort being spent on indexing its contents. The most popular solutions are created by automatic methods, and although offering impressive coverage, they are disappointing where precision of meaning is required. Alternative services created by human beings arrange and index resources…

This set of papers offers insights into some of the major developments in the field of classification and knowledge organization, and highlights many of the fundamental changes in views and theories which have taken place during the last 40 years. This document begins with a series of reminiscences from former delegates of the first International…

The Continuity Project is a research, development, and technology transfer initiative aimed at creating a "Library of the Future" by combining features of an online public access catalog (OPAC) and a campus wide information system (CWIS) with advanced facilities drawn from such areas as artificial intelligence (AI), knowledge…

The problem of transferring library and information searching skills from high school to college is not new, but has become intensified in the last decade by the pressures of the information explosion, new technologies, and budget reductions. This paper compares the library skills required of students in their final year of high school with those…

Distance education created new challenges regarding the delivery of large size isochronous continuous streaming media (SM) objects. In this paper, we consider the design of a framework for customized SM presentations, where each presentation consists of a number of SM objects that should be retrieved and displayed to the user in a coherent…

S. R. Ranganathan's five laws of library science, originally published in 1931, provide the basis for reflections on current trends in academic libraries.

Simple name-retrieval models of spoken word planning (Bloem & La Heij, 2003; Starreveld & La Heij, 1996) maintain (1) that there are two levels in word planning, a conceptual and a lexical phonological level, and (2) that planning a word in both object naming and oral reading involves the selection of a lexical phonological representation.…

Computer-based cognitive tools may have an important role to play in making widespread improvements in history teaching. Scholars agree that one important way to help students understand history is to involve them in historical interpretation, and there have been promising developments in the design of tools that scaffold students' interpretation…

In this article, we describe TM4L, an environment for building, maintaining and using standards-based, ontology-aware e-learning repositories. It is based on the idea that concept-driven access to learning material implemented as a topic map can bridge the gap between a learner and targeted knowledge. One of the driving goals of this work is to…

A usability study was undertaken at Penn State University to explore how students search the library's online catalog after they have received library instruction. In 2004, eight first-year students received library instruction and were subsequently recruited for the study. Participants were recorded using the online catalog, and a think-aloud…

The project described was an outgrowth of a recently completed study on the establishment of a data base of Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) for studying talent flow. Both examinee-level and matrix data files created and analyzed under the original project were rearranged to make them more accessible to researchers. These multiyear files…

This worksheet is a supplement to "ERIC Basics: How To Use ERIC To Search Your Special Education Topic." It provides an example of how a special education question can be converted to a strategy for searching the ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center) database. The worksheet suggests that the ERIC user write the topic in his or…

This booklet is designed to explain how the ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center) and ECER (Exceptional Child Education Resources) databases can be used to find information about the education of children and youth who have disabilities or who are gifted. Chapters cover the following topics: what ERIC is, where ERIC can be found, how to…

This report first analyzes the need for a Technical Assistance Center (TAC) Clearinghouse, which would provide a range of services including question answering for state and local education agencies, workshop preparation assistance, and literature surveys. Addressing the question of feasibility of a computerized information retrieval system for…

Designed to provide guidance in selecting appropriate software for library automation, information storage and retrieval, or management of bibliographic databases, this inventory describes 188 computer software packages. The information was obtained through a questionnaire survey of 600 software suppliers and developers who were asked to describe…