Reports on a conference workshop that addressed Visual Information Retrieval Interfaces (VIRIs). Topics include evaluation methods; task dimension for evaluating VIRIs; efforts to fund European development of VIRIs; metrics, including cosine vector; navigation among documents; and interactions with users. (LRW)

Describes bicultural (United States and Russia) development of a computer-aided instruction (CAI) tool to learn management decision-making using information systems technologies. The program has been used with undergraduate and graduate students in both countries; it integrates free and controlled market concepts and combines traditional computer…

Discusses information retrieval systems and the need to have them adapt to user needs, integrate information in any format, reveal patterns and trends in information, and answer questions. Topics include statistics and probability; natural language processing; intelligent agents; concept mapping; machine-aided indexing; text mining; filtering;…

Describes a study of college freshmen that investigated the effects of navigation maps on search performance, browsing behavior, and cognitive map development within hierarchical-structured hypertext courseware. Results of analysis of variance indicate that map type significantly affected search performance and browsing behavior. (Author/LRW)

Describes a method of full-text scanning for matches in a large dictionary. The method is suitable for selective dissemination of information systems, accommodating large dictionaries and typical digital data rates. It can be implemented on a single commercially-available board hosted by a personal computer or entirely in software. (Author/AEF)

Presents suggestions for content-rich classroom encyclopedias on CO-ROM and DVD, including: the Encarta Reference Suite 2001; the 2001 Grolier Multimedia Encyclopedia, School Edition; the Britannica 2001 DVD; and the World Book 2001 Deluxe Edition, v5.0. (SM)

Application service providers sell schools Web-based access to sophisticated computer applications that might be too costly to purchase or would require more expensive computers. ASPs serve data and software through the user's desktop computer via a connection to the Internet. Applications and provider names are specified. (MLH)

Discussion of the mission of higher education in the 21st century considers such issues as knowledge production, intellectual property, access to higher education, professional education, higher education's niche in an information society ecosystem, and defining an institutional mission. Resources for each of these topics are listed. (DB)

Reevaluates the "Success" search strategy (Chaim, 1994) based on the principle of planning the search according to four successive phases. Evaluation was conducted by in-depth interviews with professional information searchers. Panelists were asked to critically analyze the strategy's rationale, evaluate the basic components, and reflect on…

The systematic four-step process introduced in this article lays the basic groundwork in helping an organization link all its programs and initiatives to its strategic goals. Discusses the definition and purpose of performance measurement; elements of a global performance system; and building a global performance measurement system. (AEF)

Retrieval performance of the iso-content-based angle similarity measure within the angle, distance, conjunction, disjunction, and ellipse retrieval models is compared with retrieval performance of the distance similarity measure and the angle similarity measure. Results show the iso-content-based angle similarity measure achieves satisfactory…

Suggests an alternative document representation method based on "exemplary documents," those that describe or exhibit the intellectual structure of a particular field of interest. Exemplary documents provide both an indexing vocabulary for that area and a narrative context in which the indexing terms have a clearer meaning. It is much…

The periodic TRECs (Text Retrieval Conferences) have reported the results of a variety of recall studies in large-scale document retrieval. While the efforts of TREC are noteworthy and laudable, there are reasons why its results, especially the recall values that are central to its conclusions, should be accepted with some caution. (Contains 17…

Suggests that preliminary findings from research on intellectual access to digital images indicate a need for improved browsing tools, image manipulation software, feedback mechanisms, and query analysis. Discusses problems of image retrieval identified in current research, reports on an evaluation project in process, and proposes a framework for…

Finding information on the Web without encountering numerous false positives poses a challenge to multimedia information retrieval systems (MMIR). This research focuses on improving precision and recall in an MMIR system by interactively combining text processing with image processing in both the indexing and retrieval phases. A picture search…