In the late 1990s the Archives of Ontario adopted a version of the Australian "series system" for the arrangement of Government of Ontario records. Series-based systems of arrangement and description provide an alternative means for archives to represent the relationships between a body of records, the functions and activities that…

The aim of the present study was to investigate whether costs invoked by the presence of an irrelevant singleton distractor in a visual search task are due to attentional capture by the irrelevant singleton or spatially unrelated filtering costs. Measures of spatial effects were based on distance effects, compatibility effects, and differences…

Purpose: In 1980, Porter presented a simple algorithm for stemming English language words. This paper summarises the main features of the algorithm, and highlights its role not just in modern information retrieval research, but also in a range of related subject domains. Design/methodology/approach: Review of literature and research involving use…

Individuals influence each others' decisions about cultural products such as songs, books, and movies; but to what extent can the perception of success become a "self-fulfilling prophecy"? We have explored this question experimentally by artificially inverting the true popularity of songs in an online "music market," in which 12,207 participants…

Purpose: This paper seeks to report selective findings of a wider study to identify the mechanisms that end users employ to overcome their information seeking failure on the web. Design/methodology/approach: Data collection was conducted by semi-structured and in-depth interviews. The study adopted a qualitative approach and was carried out based…

Correct spelling is increasingly important in our technological world. We examined children's and adults' Web search behavior for easy and more difficult to spell target keywords. Grade 4 children and university students searched for the life cycle of the lemming (easy to spell target keyword) or the ptarmigan (difficult to spell target keyword).…

A model is proposed to explain the retrieval characteristics of an information retrieval system. (Author)

Proposes a system of evaluating information retrieval systems. (PF)

Explores the properties of independent variables in information retrieval systems and defines a class of basic variables named M-factors. (Author/PF)

This report summarizes the work carried out on the automatic construction of keyword classifications and their use in information retrieval. It discusses the possible characteristics of such classifications, and potential ways of using them; and describes the various approaches to classification that were considered in terms of an overall frame of…

The main purpose of the experiment was to answer the question whether broad or narrow terms function most effectively in the retrieval of relevant documents. The answer depends on what the user of the retrieval system wants, his wants being expressed in terms of stated precision-recall preference, or by the exact number of relevant documents he…

Present day shortcomings in information retrieval are the results of a failure to properly contend with the problem of data representation. The index provides the necessary linkage between a multiplicity of sources and a single receiver. Whether considering the source/document-space interface or the query/index interface, the elements of the…

The ability of various Aerospace Materials Information Center (AMIC) information specialists to prepare search strategies for document retrieval was studied by providing ten typical search request statements to seven information specialists. Each specialist prepared search strategies independently. Significant variations occurred among the…

Suggests that a possible reason for receiver-operating characteristics (ROC) curves having a slope other than unity when plotted on Normal-deviate axes is that the dichotomy into relevant and nonrelevant items is artificial, and that there is really a bivariate distribution of objective relevance and relevance as assessed by the information…