While the Internet undeniably contains an enormous amount of information, community colleges should consider some key issues before joining the headlong rush toward virtual classrooms. First, information can be very difficult to find on the Internet. Although search engines, web databases, and subject directories have been developed to help users…

This guide offers suggestions on conducting literature reviews on topics relating to children and youth with disabilities. The guide recommends that the researcher begin by accessing a computerized database at a university, public, or private library. It specifically describes the ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center) database and the…

Despite accompanying drawbacks, the Internet information system known as Gopher presents a rich variety of potential benefits to writing pedagogies and to educational administrators. Writing teachers need to overcome tendencies to think of exploration of the Internet information resources as something to be uncritically adopted and as something to…

This paper argues that as the number of concordance lines presented to researchers increases in line with ever-growing corpus size, the automatic selection of the most central lines will become more important. A method will be presented for selecting the most representative members from a set of concordance lines on the basis of repeated lexical…

Designed to introduce the college student to library research and information use skills, this guide begins with an initial survey of the topic and progresses to how to write a report. It is divided into the following sections: (1) Introduction to Library Research; (2) Analyzing Your Subject and Beginning Your Research Plan; (3) Gathering…

Noting that information retrieval in the library is a task that is ubiquitous and easily overlooked in colleges, this paper discusses the importance of possessing effective library research skills. The speaker recounts his experiences with conducting library research as a doctoral student and describes how this problem eventually evolved into a…

Hypermedia computing now makes it possible to integrate media into interactive programs with the potential to expand the use of visualization in science, art, and other professional disciplines. After an overview of some visualization issues in hypermedia, a research project called "HyperGlyphs" at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute in…

This paper describes the techniques for implementing a full-screen, custom SPIRES interface for a public-use library database. The database-independent protocol that controls the system is described in detail. Source code for an entire working application using this interface is included. The protocol, with less than 170 lines of procedural code,…

Bibliographers and librarians are aware of the new information technologies in information storage and retrieval. CD-ROMs and online database systems are two technologies used daily to assist users in accessing needed information. Although these resources are lacking in the fields of journalism and mass communication, possibilities for…

Scripted cooperative learning and individual learning of descriptive information were compared in a 2-x-2 factorial design with 104 undergraduates. Influenced by models of individual learning and cognition, differences were assessed in (1) information acquisition and retrieval, (2) the quality and quantity of recalled information, and (3) the…

Designed to provide an overview of the nature and focus of activity in the fledgling videotex industry in the United States and Canada, this updated and extended report presents in-depth reviews of 26 projects which reflect the involvement of such industries as publishing, retailing, agriculture, banking, other financial intermediaries,…

Patron use of periodical indexes at an urban academic research library was studied over a 7-week period in the summer of 1982. A total of 98 patrons were interviewed on a random basis as they used various periodical and newspaper indexes. The questionnaire was designed to gather information on citation elements, the methods patrons use to locate…

Ways a microcomputer can be used to establish and maintain an evaluation database and types of data management features possible on a microcomputer are described in this report, which contains step-by-step procedures and numerous examples for establishing a database, manipulating data, and designing and printing reports. Following a brief…

In "Contemporary Needs and Possibilities to Improve the Exchange of Bibliographical Information/Data Between Administrative Libraries (with Special Reference to Modern Technologies)," a discussion of the exchange of machine-readable bibliographic records, Walter Niedermeyr (Federal Republic of Germany) advocates the development of German…

CSAR (Characteristic Storage And Retrieval) is the name of an interactive item bank system for the storage, retrieval, manipulation, and summarization of information about multiple choice test items. The purpose of the system is to facilitate the test construction process. The system has two main components: one or more item banks and an…