Presents a case study of a virtual professional community for Israeli educators that is built on four "self-serving" principles: restriction, guidance, involvement, and leadership. Describes the four membership phases and their respective principles, and shows how each of these phases contributed to and advanced the individual members…

Presents a user-oriented interface for generalized informetric analysis and demonstrates how informetric calculations can be specified through advanced data modeling techniques. Topics include bibliographic data; online information retrieval systems; citation networks; query interface; impact factors; data restructuring; and multi-level…

Examines the potential of the "Australian Education Index" (AEI) as a tool to map and monitor educational research. Presents analyses that identify the thrust of research publications in Australia between 1984 and 1997. Key findings pertain to differences in the thrust of theses compared to other publications and to overall stability in…

Summarizes some key findings of academic papers presented at the First World Congress on the Management of Electronic Commerce (January, 2000, Hamilton, Ontario, Canada). Outlines two meta-management issues that surfaced: taking a strategic approach to Internet ventures and considering infrastructure design during implementation. Highlights…

Shifting between different linkages of the partners for satisfying a need is the major characteristic of the virtual organization, and meta-management beyond the individual organizational level must be applied in order to optimize the benefit for the entire organizational network. Presents a meta-management support framework based on the…

Describes a process directed at developing a simple paper-and-pencil checklist to assess Intranet effectiveness. Discusses the checklist purification procedure, and attempts to establish reliability and validity for the list. Concludes by identifying managerial applications of the checklist, recognizing the limitations of the approach, and…

Elementary and secondary teachers present tips on using technology in the classroom, including: researching and publishing travel brochures on a country of choice, creating story webs and outlines from the webs, searching for data on a favorite type of vehicle online, and creating seating arrangements using computer software (which is useful for…

Explores how, tempered by the collapse of the dot-com boom, education institutions are taking a more guarded approach to moving their purchasing operations online; however, those who have moved to such systems have found less bureaucracy, more efficiency, and better prices. (EV)

Discusses the importance of parental involvement in middle-level schools. Describes how an online threaded discussion format can create a virtual community, promoting positive parental involvement. Offers guidelines to consider when using this form of technology. (SR)

Examines the interlibrary loan process used by libraries in Singapore and proposes that the existing paper-based manual system be replaced by a Web-based system. Presents an example of such a system that has been successfully designed and implemented at the Nanyang Technological University. (Author/LRW)

Why the standard error must serve as a standard against which educational gains are measured is discussed from a policy analysis perspective, considering technical and policy levels. An online discussion of the issues in the use of the standard error is transcribed and attached. (SLD)

Discussion of the impact of the Internet on libraries focuses on librarians as creators and marketers of new online services. Describes two fee-based online services at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign and concludes that academic libraries have the ability to create new online services, especially reference services. (Author/LRW)

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…

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)