Compares retrieval performance of the "MLA International Bibliography" and the "Annual Bibliography for English Language and Literature" when searching British, American, and postcolonial writers. Considers earlier studies, implications of results that show MLA retrieves more citations, and future research needs. (LRW)

The Google search engine is growing in popularity and usually shines in performance ratings. This article summarizes findings from a technical paper written by Google's developers in 1998 before anyone had seen Google. Suggests that a careful reader of the paper will be rewarded with a deeper appreciation of the designers' ideas and…

Presents various levels of criteria for judging the quality of abstracts and abstracting. Requirements for abstracts to be read by humans are compared with requirements for those to be searched by computer. Concludes that the wide availability of complete text in electronic form does not reduce the value of abstracts for information retrieval.…

Zipf's law states that if words in a text are arranged in decreasing order of occurrence, then the product of the rank of a word and the number of times it occurs is a constant of that text. Examination of the probabilities of occurrence of multi-word phrases in information retrieval in relation to the probabilities of occurrence of single words…

Examined the search strategies used by researchers and others to search the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) database through questionnaires completed by 3,420 users. Results indicate that college professors and educational researchers do a better job searching ERIC, but most end-users should be using better search strategies. (SLD)

In the "Ant World" project, items to be retrieved are "quests" represented by entire collections of judged documents. To save space and time, methods were developed for representing these complex entities in a short string of about 1,000 bytes, called a Digital Information Pheromone (DIP). Principles are presented for…

Reports on a quantitative categorical analysis of metadata elements in the Dublin Core, VRA (Visual Resource Association) Core, REACH (Record Export for Art and Cultural Heritage), and EAD (Encoded Archival Description) metadata schemas, all of which can be used for organizing and describing images. Introduces a new schema comparison methodology…

Proposes a structure for natural language descriptions of the semantic content of visual materials that requires descriptions to be (modified) keywords, phrases, or simple sentences, with components that are grammatical relations common to many languages. This structure makes it easy to implement a collection's descriptions as a relational…

Provides a conceptualization of a communication and information system's infrastructure in order to help campus leaders plan more effectively. Discusses its elements, creating access to information, infrastructure maturity, infrastructure assessment, and technology planning for higher education. (EV)

Aspects of Data Fusion (DF) for information retrieval are explored. Based on a geometrical model of DF, it is shown that in the ideal case, performance of DF for a pair of information retrieval schemes may be approximated by a quadratic polynomial. Compares counter-intuitive cases of DF with cases that behave according to the geometric model. (AEF)

Describes a preliminary research project that applies Personal Construct Theory to user perceptions of photographs. While some problems associated with Repertory Grids for subject content analysis are identified, findings indicate they provide a useful method for collecting unbiased data about what users see in visual images and for comparing user…

Term co-occurrence analysis of INSPEC classification codes and thesaurus terms used to index Medical Informatics literature reveals an information science and technology perspective on the field, to accompany the biomedical perspective previously reported. This study continues the search for a better understanding of the structure of Medical…

This article summarizes published research on vocabulary instruction involving students with learning disabilities. Nineteen vocabulary studies that comprised 27 investigations were located. Study interventions gleaned from the review included keyword or mnemonic approaches, cognitive strategy instruction (e.g., semantic features analysis), direct…

The question raised here is about the extent that liberal individualism and the consumerist ethos is the result of technology and to what extent is it the cultural norm of modernity. There has been a polarization in the way technology is understood. Predominantly it is assumed to be neutral but it can also be argued that technology exacerbates the…

The authors adapted Web usability techniques to assess student awareness of their library's Web site. Students performed search tasks using a Web browser. Approaches were categorized according to a student's preference for, and success with, the library's Web resources. Forty-five percent of the students utilized the library's Web site as first…