Beginning this annual report is a letter to the OCLC membership from OCLC President and Chief Executive Officer, K. Wayne Smith. Statistical data are then presented in tables and/or graphs for OCLC programs and the system's financial status for fiscal years 1990/91 and 1989/90; the growth of the OCLC Online Union Catalog from 1971-1991 in terms of…

This document describes a study that designed, developed, and evaluated the Pennsylvania school-district database program for use by educational decision makers. The database contains current information developed from data provided by the Pennsylvania Department of Education and describes each of the 500 active school districts in the state. PEP…

A 5-year study of the Illinois Eastern Community College District 529 Information Referral and Retention (IR&R) Project was conducted. Its purpose was to evaluate demographic and educational information regarding 888 students enrolled in the IR&R Public Assistance Program from November 1983 through June 1988. As part of the study, an…

Specific programs and software resources are described in this report on database software for science instruction. Materials are reviewed in the categories of: (1) database management (reviewing AppleWorks, Bank Street School Filer, FileVision, Friendly Filer, MECC DataQuest: The Composer, Scholastic PFS:File, PFS:Report); (2) data files…

This discussion of experimental information retrieval focuses on the mathematical and statistical skills needed by students in librarianship and information studies. Theoretical approaches to document representation, query representation, database searching, and evaluation are reviewed, and changes in library schools' curriculum are suggested.…

This paper describes in depth the development, use, and capabilities of a microcomputer-based bibliographic system established for the International Program for Agricultural Knowledge Systems at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign. Hardware, software and outputs, and features of the INMAGIC database (adding records, searching,…

The European Patent Office (EPO) has recently implemented the last part of its ambitious automation project aimed at creating an automated search environment for approximately 1200 EPO patent search examiners. The examiners now have at their disposal an integrated set of tools offering a full range of functionalities from online searching, via…

This monograph, based on a conceptual model called an information support circle, describes a structured management process that can be used by higher education institutions to add value to institutional data and information. The model offers a sequence of (1) thinking about the management and use of data, (2) considering problems in providing…

This article reports results of a case study of text-based online and CD-ROM databases that identified design characteristics that are important to high school students' use for higher-level learning as well as for information access and retrieval. Implications for the design of databases are suggested. (Contains 62 references.) (LRW)

Suggests ways in which the Internet can supplement traditional methods of professional development for librarians. Examples include electronic journals, discussion groups, electronic courses, electronic conferences, e-mail, networking, and coauthoring via the Internet. Services listed include Internet directories, education gophers, bibliographic…

Examines how informetric characteristics of information retrieval (IR) system databases can be used to help system designers decide what type of file structures would provide the best performance. The development of appropriate models describing database contents is highlighted in this first part of a two-part study. (30 references) (LRW)

Learning Objects Metadata (LOM) aims at describing educational resources in order to allow better reusability and retrieval. In this article we show how additional inference rules allows us to derive additional metadata from existing ones. Additionally, using these rules as integrity constraints helps us to define the constraints on LOM elements,…

An online questionnaire survey was distributed amongst the Petherick Readers of the National Library of Australia, a user group of scholars and researchers. The survey asked questions about the readers' use and appreciation of the NLA catalogue. This group of users clearly appreciated the library catalogue and demonstrated that there are still…

Information Technology is developing rapidly and providing policy/decision makers with large amounts of information that require processing and analysis. Decision support systems (DSS) aim to provide tools that not only help such analyses, but enable the decision maker to experiment and simulate the effects of different policies and selection…

Purpose: Expository discourse, the use of language to convey information, requires facility with complex syntax. Although expository discourse is often employed in school and work settings, little is known about its development in children, adolescents, and adults. Hence, it is difficult to evaluate this genre in students who have language…