Discusses problems involved in maintaining special scientific or engineering libraries, including budget problems, remote storage locations, rental computer retrieval systems, protecting trade secrets, and establishing a magnetic tape library. (MLH)

Illustrates the importance of students knowing how to effectively search electronic resources. Discusses a Web site created at Chico High School and describes the three major components of the organization of electronic resources (outreach, training, and planning interview). Gives an example of a class research assignment and discusses other…

End users think of file names as a way to identify file contents, whereas computer programs often assign special meaning to file extensions. This article discusses different kinds of files on the World Wide Web: text, document, sound, video, and multimedia; file compression; and encoding formats. Includes a chart of file formats and lists Web…

Illustrates how users can take full advantage of the Internet to communicate and to network. Discusses electronic mailing, listservs and Usenet groups; referring cold connections to a Web page; and designing Web pages for maximum information retrieval by search engines. (AEF)

Freedom from the necessity for technical understanding of online technology allows librarians to focus on the human factors in online interaction. This article discusses estimates of Web use, need for user assistance, alternative sources of information, information overload and relevance, Internet identities, pornography and library policy, and…

Describes a model of information retrieval as social interaction, which distinguishes between three types of information interaction goals: (1) task-oriented; (2) topically oriented; and (3) those centered around situation assessment (SA). Results suggest that SA is an important cognitive activity in new information retrieval environments; SA…

Discusses indexing and retrieval for effective searches of digitized images. Reports on an empirical study about criteria for analysis and indexing digitized images, and the different types of user queries done in newspaper image archives in Denmark. Concludes that it is necessary that the indexing represent both a factual and an expressional…

Provides an annotated listing of various Internet sites, many that are starting points for exploration of specific health subject areas. Special considerations for locating and selecting health and medicine resources are also provided. (Author)

Presents the results of an exploratory study that focused on three elements in information retrieval research: the ways information systems are being used, the strategies users engage as they work in these systems, and the use of the World Wide Web as an information retrieval tool. Highlights include open-ended systems and self-efficacy.…

Examines whether the Library of Congress Name Authority File (LCNAF) could enhance retrieval during individual name searching of humanities databases. Results demonstrate that the LCNAF has utility in name searching of humanities databases, and it could provide the humanities scholar and search intermediary with authoritative information about the…

Investigates the shared use of core Ophthalmology terms in the domains of Ophthalmology, Family Practice and Radiology. Core terms were searched for in a text corpus of 38,695 MEDLINE abstracts covering 1970-1999 from journals representing the three domains. Findings indicated core Ophthalmology terms were used significantly more by Ophthalmology…

Investigates situational elements of the home as a Web use environment, examining how domestic settings influenced people's Web search activities and behaviors. The subjects, 12 participants in 10 households, were found to search on the Web more frequently, more briefly, and less intensely for broader and more diverse information. Results have…

Analyzed user queries submitted to an academic Web site during a four-year period, using a relational database, to examine users' query behavior, to identify problems they encounter, and to develop techniques for optimizing query analysis and mining. Linguistic analyses focus on query structures, lexicon, and word associations using statistical…

Discusses information searching as a series of user decisions and considers the effects of the user's knowledge and the configuration of the information retrieval system. Investigates what the user needs to know to make informed search decisions at the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics Web site and describes user queries. (Author/LRW)

Examines the developing state of subject access on the Web. Topics include new scholarly research methods; authority control; cataloging and metadata; interoperability and thesauri development; extensibility, including XML and RDF (resource description framework); indexing and information retrieval; flexibility in subject classification; and…