Examines situations/purposes users have for searching the Web and perceptions of the textual features that assist users in characterizing documents/text retrieval in actual Web searches. The study employs a bottom-up approach to derive a set of genres built around actual use of the Web. After employing content-analytic techniques to derive a…

Presents a text summarization system and examines its validity by comparing automatically generated summaries with human-generated ones. Examines the accuracy of the system by evaluating the representativeness of cue verbs and basic sentence patterns, as well as the essential information in a summary. Also analyzes syntactic and semantic errors of…

Applying the expectancy-value theory of motivation to the Web environment, a site that stimulates the interest and curiosity of the user and provides meaningful content and activities may be considered a valuable Web site. The authors developed evaluation instruments that are intended for use by educators and students from grade one through…

How do you engage faculty in the task of developing student information literacy? This case study offers a model for incorporating information retrieval into a social science research project so that literacy becomes an intrinsic part of the course assignment. Students showed significant gains in database search and assessment skills with minimal…

Student information systems, one of the first applications of computer technology in education, are undergoing a significant transition yet again. The first major shift in SIS technologies occurred about 15 years ago when they evolved from mainframe programs to client-server solutions. Now, vendors across the board are offering centralized…

Computer-based cognitive tools may have an important role to play in making widespread improvements in history teaching. Scholars agree that one important way to help students understand history is to involve them in historical interpretation, and there have been promising developments in the design of tools that scaffold students' interpretation…

This study tested the hypothesis that children with high working memory capacities solve single-digit additions by direct retrieval of the answers from long-term memory more often than do children with low working memory capacities. Counting and reading letter span tasks were administered to groups of third-grade (mean age=107 months) and…

As the Internet becomes a resource in the classroom, students must learn to glean maximally from that information using skills that enhance their understandings. Students engage in activities involved with Internet searching to the degree that they are skilled and motivated. This article reports on a research study that demonstrates that the model…

In this article, we describe TM4L, an environment for building, maintaining and using standards-based, ontology-aware e-learning repositories. It is based on the idea that concept-driven access to learning material implemented as a topic map can bridge the gap between a learner and targeted knowledge. One of the driving goals of this work is to…

A survey of a group of distance graduate students showed their strong preference for easy and fast information retrieval and a significant association between motivation for using information and field of study. Motivation and field of study also explained differences in primary information source selection and use of home institution libraries.

The goal of this work is to extend the theoretical understanding of the relationship between hippocampal spatial and memory functions to the level of neurophysiological mechanisms underlying spatial navigation and episodic memory retrieval. The proposed unifying theory describes both phenomena within a unique framework, as based on one and the…

A usability study was undertaken at Penn State University to explore how students search the library's online catalog after they have received library instruction. In 2004, eight first-year students received library instruction and were subsequently recruited for the study. Participants were recorded using the online catalog, and a think-aloud…

Distance education created new challenges regarding the delivery of large size isochronous continuous streaming media (SM) objects. In this paper, we consider the design of a framework for customized SM presentations, where each presentation consists of a number of SM objects that should be retrieved and displayed to the user in a coherent…

S. R. Ranganathan's five laws of library science, originally published in 1931, provide the basis for reflections on current trends in academic libraries.

Simple name-retrieval models of spoken word planning (Bloem & La Heij, 2003; Starreveld & La Heij, 1996) maintain (1) that there are two levels in word planning, a conceptual and a lexical phonological level, and (2) that planning a word in both object naming and oral reading involves the selection of a lexical phonological representation.…