Introduces the Institute for Scientific Information's (ISI) electronic library project, and discusses the project's technological, economic, and legal issues. Describes computer system requirements that allow ISI's electronic library prototype to provide users with bibliographic information, abstracts, and full images of journals. (JMV)

Thirty postgraduate librarianship students learned about PRECIS indexing using a system that responds as flexibly and intelligently as a human expert to natural language queries. Interactions were logged and analyzed. The evidence obtained supports the notion that individuals employ distinct strategies when interacting with information sources in…

Discusses benefits of travel for school library media specialists. Topics addressed include individual awareness of flexibility and adaptability; adapting to and accepting cultural differences; developing better perspectives on our own countries and programs; and sources of information on courses or study tours for university credit that are…

Examines changes in policies issued by the U.S. Office of Management and Budget regarding the management of federal information resources. Highlights include information management policy; the role of state and local governments; records management; user charges; planning; information dissemination management systems; electronic collection and…

Discusses issues relating to the public interest regarding the National Information Infrastructure. Topics addressed include access, including access to the physical infrastructure and resources and access as a service provider; information rights, including privacy, intellectual property, freedom of speech, and government information; public…

Discusses the current state of the art in virtual reality (VR), its historical background, and future possibilities. Highlights include applications in medicine, art and entertainment, science, business, and telerobotics; and VR for information science, including graphical display of bibliographic data, libraries and books, and cyberspace.…

Considers the need for staff training in virtual libraries. Highlights include instruction and training, including in-house training, vendor contracts, and self-paced instruction; documentation; current awareness via professional literature, electronic discussions, bibliographies, and conferences; information filtering through selective…

Describes a study conducted at Columbia University (New York) to compare the costs of borrowing and document delivery with the costs of ownership of periodicals and monographs in the areas of biology, physics, and electrical engineering. Results suggest that access may be more important than ownership for some titles. (LRW)

Describes a study that investigated search intermediaries' requests for information from patrons during mediated online searching in an academic library. Topics of search intermediaries' elicitations include search terms and strategies, database selection, relevance of retrieved items, patrons' knowledge and previous information seeking, and other…

Explores problems of three groups of Russian-language students using romanized Cyrillic bibliographic records. Investigates students' ability to keyword search using Russian records romanized according to Library of Congress transliteration tables. Results show that transliteration is one of the factors limiting access by Russian-language students…

Explains the history and organization of the U.S. Global Change Research Program. Highlights include participating agencies; data and information management needs, including the Global Change Data and Information System (GCDIS); and four sidebars that discuss GCDIS implementation, prototype projects, the library access, search, and retrieval pilot…

The Naval Research Laboratory (NRL) Library and the American Physical Society (APS) are experimenting with electronically disseminating journals and reports in a project called TORPEDO (The Optical Retrieval Project: Electronic Documents Online). Scanned journals and reports are converted to ASCII, then attached to bibliographic information, and…

Three alternative career options for teacher librarians are discussed in separate articles written by individuals who have changed careers: a school principal, a computer resources teacher, and a consultant. It is noted that each of these careers requires skills that many school librarians already possess. (LAE)

Describes a Delphi study conducted for the Netherlands Council for Libraries and Information Services (RABIN) to forecast the future of information services in the year 2000. Highlights include information supply; information attributes; user needs; substitution of print by electronic information; the role of publishers; generic coding; and…

Discussion of the application of TQM (Total Quality Management) to libraries addresses planning based on customer needs and use of the scientific method to evaluate customer satisfaction. A TQM experiment at Marquette Middle School (Wisconsin) is examined, and ways that TQM was used to meet the needs of homeless students are described. (MES)