Examines trends in Web searching, including the proposed AOL and Time Warner merger; minibrowsers; micropayments for information; inability of search engines to keep up with Web growth; distributed search engines; human-compiled directories; increasing relevance to meet user needs; browser-free searching; whole document queries; and introducing…

Describes Semio, a company founded in 1996 that uses semiology to provide straightforward access to information. Discusses the text-mining engine at the core of the company's software; products; focus on the intranet market; competitors; partnership with corporate portals. (AEF)

Analyzes certain features of work tasks and relates these features to types of information people are looking for and using in their tasks, patterning of search strategies for obtaining information and relevance assessments in choosing retrieved documents. The major claim is that these information activities are systematically connected to task…

Can we use the methods of Web usability testing to learn about library instruction? This article is among the first in the field trying to establish a link between usability and instruction. The author discusses useful insights that Web usability can bring to our pedagogy as well as to the efficiency of library instruction. The result of a Web…

A central question in online human sentence comprehension is, "How are linguistic relations established between different parts of a sentence?" Previous work has shown that this dependency resolution process can be computationally expensive, but the underlying reasons for this are still unclear. This article argues that dependency…

Three hosted federated search tools, Follett One Search, Gale PowerSearch Plus, and WebFeat Express, were configured and implemented in a school library. Databases from five vendors and the OPAC were systematically searched. Federated search results were compared with each other and to the results of the same searches in the database's native…

Fieldwork remains the mainstay in the study of geography and in the analysis of the environmental processes. However, an in-depth understanding of the environmental and geographical processes requires extensive as well as intensive fieldwork that involves time and substantial effort, both of which may pose a problem within a given curriculum time.…

This study investigates the relationships between the use of a zoom tool, the terms they supply to describe the image, and the type of image being viewed. Participants were assigned to two groups, one with access to the tool and one without, and were asked to supply terms to describe forty images, divided into four categories: landscape, portrait,…

The Thesaurus for Education Systems in Europe (TESE-2009 edition) is a multilingual thesaurus and a robust information retrieval tool focusing on European education systems and policies. It is specifically designed to cover the indexation needs of the Eurydice network and to facilitate information retrieval on Eurydice's central website. It can…

This book is designed primarily to help users find meaningful words for natural language, or free-text, computer searching of bibliographic and textual databases in the social and behavioral sciences. Additionally, it covers many socially relevant and technical topics not covered by the usual literary thesaurus, therefore it may also be useful for…

In an attempt to measure on-line searching performance, test searches of one question conducted by three bibliographic searchers are analysed to determine the effects of search strategy on results. The study reviews retrieved citations for relevance, calculating precision values, and estimated recall for each search. Performance analysis reveals…

An automated retrieval system for reference works was constructed as a prototype in order to illustrate the capabilities and potentialities of future retrieval systems. More than 170 biographical works were indexed and stored in a computer disk to form a biographical data base, and a computer program was written to match patron queries. Consistent…

PROBE, a batch-mode information retrieval program used to search the Educational Resources Information Center (ERIC) data base, was developed by Indiana University. To evaluate the effectiveness of the program, questionnaires were given to the users of 200 consecutive searches during February 1973. Relevance ratios were computed by comparing the…

The purpose of this guide is to give an up-to-date presentation of the information service offered by the documentation center at the Royal Institute of Technology (RIT) and to facilitate the utilization of the service. The guide gives a general account of the multidisciplinary computerized current awareness service (SDI) and a detailed…

The transfer of information through space and time in communication systems is often accompanied by significant delays which give rise to meaningful storage problems. Mathematical models have been developed for the study of these kinds of problems which are applicable to the design of manual, library-type, or mechanized information storage and…