Describes current indexing systems, documents the shift from manual to automated indexing methods, and offers suggestions for writers and editors on the critical importance of careful wording and controlled vocabularies to ensure effective access to technical and scientific articles. Suggests teaching strategies for helping students control…

This article continues the description of DFT (Document, Find, Theseus), an online documentation system that provides computer-managed on-demand printing of software manuals as well as the interactive retrieval of reference passages. Document boundaries in the hypertext database are discussed, search vocabulary complexities are described, and text…

Examined the use of the TREC Information Retrieval Test Collection for evaluating visual information retrieval interfaces (VIRI). Found that TREC data sets were suitable as development tools for VIRIs and traditional information retrieval systems and that the computational cost of organizing data into useful visual fields were high and related to…

Summarizes information that will be used to describe microform sets on the University of California, Irvine's World Wide Web site for microform resources, including title, publisher, price, contents, index/bibliography, reviewed in, location/holdings, and Webpac site. Discusses staff/network resources, HTML/UNIX editors, and indexing/search…

Potential problems for college and university computing functions posed by arrival of the year 2000 (Y2K) are discussed, including arithmetic calculations and sorting functions based on two-digit year dates, embedding of two-digit dates in archival data, system coordination for data exchange, unique number generation, and leap year calculations. A…

Examines central issues in the application of logic to information retrieval (IR). Discusses the logical relationship between document and need; implications of models based on truth, validity, or logical consequentiality, and the relationship between this issue and the issue of partiality versus totality of information; and the relationship…

Presents a probabilistic technique to retrieve passages from texts having a large size or heterogeneous semantic content. Results of experiments comparing the probabilistic technique to one based on a text segmentation algorithm revealed that the passage size affects passage retrieval performance; text organization and query generality may have an…

Discusses Internet domain naming practices and indicates which Web search engines can effectively search on domain names. Explains top-level domain (TLD) (ex. http://www.access.gpo.gov - ".gov" = top level; ".gpo" = second level; ".access" = third level; and "www" = fourth level domain). Outlines seven new…

Given technology's potentially negative effects on creativity, educators must examine the Internet's capabilities and best uses in the main office, school, and classroom. To locate superior Web sites, teachers should identify sponsors' affiliations, examine content, scrutinize ratings and awards, check listed references, and gather multiple…

Describes the building of a list of constructed-impact factors (CIF) for biomedical journals not included in the 1996 editions of the "Journal Citation Reports." The online retrieval from the host DIMDI of the data needed for impact-factor calculation is described. The top 100 (of 338 titles, ranked according to their CIFs) are…

Describes the development and application of visualization techniques for users to access and explore information in digital libraries effectively and intuitively. Salient semantic structures and citation patterns are extracted from several collections of documents using Latent Semantic Indexing and Pathfinder Network Scaling. Author cocitation…

Compares five World Wide Web search engines for precision on the first 20 results returned for 15 queries, adding weight for ranking effectiveness. Discusses methods to lessen evaluator bias, evaluation criteria, definition of relevance, experimental design, the structure of queries, and future work. (Author/LRW)

Compares the performance of the Target and Freestyle commercial search engines. Discusses traditional performance measures such as precision and recall, analytic models of performance, document rankings, query difficulty and correlates with other performance characteristics, and future research needs. (LRW)

Describes a relevance-feedback mechanism for content-based image retrieval that evaluates the feature distributions of the images judged relevant by the user and updates both the similarity measure and the query to accurately represent the user's information needs. (Author/LRW)

Discusses the need for the design of new user interfaces for digital libraries and describes SenseMaker, a user-centered interface for information retrieval in a heterogeneous digital library. Topics include iterative bundling of articles and citations; evaluation results; increasing fluidity between browsing and searching; and filtering.…