Proposes a model that assists in understanding indexing on the World Wide Web and presents an experiment assessing the validity of Inverse Document Frequency (IDF) as a term weighting strategy for Web documents. Findings indicate that IDF scores are not stable in the heterogeneous and dynamic context of the Web. (Author/AEF)

A French-language version of stock footage videotapes from previous research (using English-language data) was prepared, using the same images. The most popular terms identified in each of the two studies for each of the shots are compared, to determine the rate of correspondence between potential indexing terms in each language. (Author/AEF)

Discusses libraries' uses of filters to prevent access to objectionable sites on the Internet. Highlights include the American Library Association's resolution against filters as a violation of First Amendment rights; patron's use of terminals for e-mail or games; using filters for collection management; and listservs and online resources…

Describes a study that investigated the affective responses of 83 subjects at the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee to 2 versions of a hypertext-based bibliographic retrieval system. The utility of using factor analysis to explore subjects' search experiences is explained, and the effects of different types of linkages are compared. (Author/LRW)

When the Higher Education Library Information Network of Rhode Island transferred members' bibliographic data into a shared online public access catalog (OPAC), 10% of the University of Rhode Island's monograph records were missing. This article describes the consortium's attempts to retrieve records from the database and the effectiveness of…

Advice is given and sources of information are suggested for use of the Internet and World Wide Web. Services for news, business and commerce, literary offerings, online magazines, travel, and online instruction are included. The information is intended for new users of this information technology. (MSE)

Reports on an exploratory case study of intermediation in a hospital digital library information service. Focuses on intermediation where user-intermediary communications were conducted through an asynchronous text-based digital medium. Contributions of the study are evidenced in a descriptive framework of nine categories of factors perceived as…

Proposes a method for protein name extraction from biological texts. The method exploits hand-crafted rules based on heuristics and a set of protein names (dictionary). The approach avoids use of natural language processing tools so as to improve processing speed. Evaluation experiments were conducted in terms of: accuracy, generalizability, and…

Describes a methodology for collecting and extracting linguistic forms from documents authored by healthcare consumers. The forms were mapped to concepts and the resulting terms were analyzed. Although the case study uses examples from a "consumer medical vocabulary," procedures are applicable to investigating non-professional vocabularies in…

Reports results from a project that investigated the influence of two types of expertise--knowledge of the search domain and experience of the Web search engines--on students' use of a Web search engine. Results showed participants with good knowledge in the domain and participants with high experience of the Web had the best performances. (AEF)

Compares users' self-reported and observed usability problems within a Web-based information system. Participants were asked to complete a specific list of tasks within the system, after which they answered several questions regarding the system's usability. While, advanced users generally completed the tasks in less time than novices, the number…

Describes the design and implementation of a prototype visualization system, AuthorLink, to enhance author searching. AuthorLink is based on author co-citation analysis and visualization mapping algorithms. AuthorLink produces interactive author maps in real time from a database of 1.26 million records supplied by the Institute for Scientific…

Discusses cross-language, multilingual, and bilingual information retrieval on the Web; evaluates retrieval effectiveness of indexing and search strategies based on test collections from CLEF (Cross-Language Evaluation Forum) in English, French, German, and Italian; and suggests and evaluates database merging strategies. Appendices include…

Explains the objective of the ARL (Association of Research Libraries) Scholars Portal initiative as the development of scholarly productivity tools and services. Considers the library's role and describes the initial emphasis on developing a tool that delivers licensed and openly available digital content across a range of subject fields and from…

Describes the visualization of a navigation classification scheme in an information retrieval (IR) system. Highlights include Charles Cutter's rules for creating a dictionary catalog; user needs; an example of undergraduate research using this scheme; and user interaction with the IR system. (Contains 64 references.) (Author/LRW)