It is increasingly important to design local biomedical databases with attention to naming and classification standards. In some cases, common nomenclature will not be suitable, having been designed for another purpose, but much will be useful. Development of standard nomenclature is a social responsibility in the electronic biomedical community.…

Describes methods for applying natural-language processing for automatic concept-based indexing of full text and methods for exploiting the structure and hierarchy of full-text documents to a large collection of full-text documents drawn from the Health Services/Technology Assessment Text database at the National Library of Medicine. Examines how…

Reports the results of experiments with MEDLINE that used lexical statistics such as word-frequency counts to discover hidden connections in medical literature. Discusses problems with relying on bibliographic citations or standard indexing methods to establish a relationship between topics that might profitably be explored by scientific research.…

Provides tips on searching Chemical Abstracts (CA). Discusses coverage, indexing policies, differences between the print and online versions, transliterations, arrangement of the print indexes, abbreviations, and importance of the CA Index Guide for effective searching. (MES)

Describes efforts in supporting information retrieval from OCR (optical character recognition) degraded text. Reports on approaches used in an automatic cataloging and searching contest for books in multiple languages, including a vector space retrieval model, an n-gram indexing method, and a weighting scheme; and discusses problems of Asian…

Provides an overview of robots that retrieve World Wide Web documents and index data and then store it in a database. Nine robot-generated databases are described, including record content, services, search features, and sample search results; and sidebars discuss the controversy about Web robots and other resource discovery tools. (LRW)

Provides a brief background of the Biological Abstracts' title index, "Biological Abstracts' Subject in Context" (BASIC) "Stop List," or compilation of nonsignificant words that were going to be automatically stopped from printing. Notes that the Stop List provided an improvement over the raw computer output of titles while…

Reports on a research project to build a new indexing technique, integrating experiences in database searching and indexing into a matrix model based on Internet use. Emphasizes the need for improving Web usability in specific domains and gives two examples from Italian Web sites, one for museums and one for health information. (Author/LRW)

Provides an introduction to articles in this special "Perspectives" issue of "Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology." The articles, taken collectively, contain significant elements of a research agenda in image indexing and retrieval for the next decade. Articles focus on user, representation,…

The Indexical Hypothesis suggests a new method for enhancing children's reading comprehension. Young readers may not consistently "index," or map, words to the objects the words represent. Consequently, these readers fail to derive much meaning from the text. The instructional method involves manipulating toy objects referred to in the…

Computer literacy has evolved from writing simple BASIC programs to using desktop productivity applications. The shift from mainframe to personal computer brought about the need to rethink computer literacy courses to introduce basic skills and familiarity using desktop productivity applications. While these skills remain important, the recent…

Social technologies such as Weblogs, wikis, and social bookmarking are emerging both as information resources and as tools for research. This paper reflects on these technologies and suggests they may be well placed to build fluency in the higher-order thinking skills outlined in various information literacy frameworks, particularly in an…

Rules and guidelines are provided for ERIC catalogers and editors engaged in capturing bibliographic data for the documents and journal articles entered into the ERIC database. A general discussion of the principles of ERIC cataloging, definitions used, use of mandatory vs. optional data elements, etc. is provided in the Introduction. The body…

The index term input to three information retrieval systems has been analyzed in detail in order to form the input to a completely computerized simulation of an information retrieval system. The paper reports that, with certain reservations, index terms conform in general with the Bradford distribution. (Author)

This subject guide to materials in the reference collection of the Thomas G. Carpenter Library at the University of North Florida brings together reference works on similar subjects that are cataloged under dissimilar Library of Congress call numbers. The reference works listed are some of the more notable and frequently used titles in the…