The web is a rich and diverse information source with incredible amounts of information about all kinds of subjects in various forms. This information source affords great opportunity to build systems that support users in their work and everyday lives. To help users explore information on the web, web search systems should find information that…

Health"Insite" is the Australian Government's Internet gateway to reliable health information online, providing access to over 15,000 information items on the websites of more than 80 approved information partners. The gateway provides a variety of searching and browsing options to assist users to find information on a wide range of…

In today's world of instant everything, everyone has been exposed to some form of Web 2.0 technology, and higher education is not exempt from its long reach. Libraries of all types are incorporating Web 2.0 features to attract users as well as to showcase library services. The Online Public Access Catalog (OPAC) has become more user-friendly with…

Automated storage/retrieval systems (ASRSs) are playing an integral part in today's library operations and collections management. Eastern Michigan University installed an ASRS as part of the new Halle Library, which opened in May 1998, to provide "storage" for up to 800,000 items. Over the past 10 years our policies and procedures have…

The Foundations of Inquiry (FOI) course at Illinois State University was a required freshmen course designed to prepare incoming students for the requirements of their various academic programs. One of the course's goals was for students to receive instruction in information literacy (IL) skills and become accustomed to locating and retrieving…

First offered to public libraries in 2004, downloadable audiobooks have grown by leaps and bounds. According to the Audio Publishers Association, their sales today account for 21% of the spoken-word audio market. It hasn't been easy, however. WMA. DRM. MP3. AAC. File extensions small on letters but very big on consequences for librarians,…

Background/Context: A thorough understanding of the information-seeking behaviors of specific disciplines, as well as distinct user groups within a discipline, is fundamental to the process of development of disciplinary informatics. Significant research has been conducted, largely by library and information science scholars across a range of…

This article shows how to use Microsoft Excel to get data from the Internet into a statistically usable form.

Many colleges use cellphones to warn the campus of potential threats. The devices are, after all, in almost every student's pocket. Now worried instructors and administrators say that students might use phones to cheat on tests. Not only do cellphones give students a new way to stealthily ask a friend for help. They now have the ability to access…

Describes a relevance decision model based on a threshold concept and techniques to validate the model which were developed through pretesting. (Author/PF)

The principle that, for optimal retrieval, documents should be ranked in order of the probability of relevance is discussed. (Author/KP)

The purpose of this communication is to suggest that in the situation where documents are retrieved independently the desired parameters may be estimated more accurately by sampling and averaging techniques over homogeneous subparts of the data base. (4 references) (Author)

Discussion of XML, information retrieval, precision, and recall focuses on a retrieval technique that adopts the similarity measure of the vector space model, incorporates the document structure, and supports structured queries. Topics include a query model based on tree matching; structured queries and term-based ranking; and term frequency and…

The goal of this study was to examine the impact of a one-to-one program on the implementation of learning skills, information literacy, and the usage of computerized tools among students. These skills are part of the demands placed upon schools to develop 21st century competencies. Seventh and ninth grade students participated in this study…