Discusses various search strategies and tools that can be used for searching on the Internet, including search engines and search directories; Boolean searching; metasearching; relevancy ranking; automatic phrase detection; backlinks; natural-language searching; clustering and cataloging information; image searching; customization and portals;…

Describes a study that examined the effectiveness of eight search engines for the World Wide Web. Calculated traditional information-retrieval measures of recall and precision at varying numbers of retrieved documents to use as the bases for statistical comparisons of retrieval effectiveness. Also examined the overlap between search engines.…

Discusses evidence-based medicine (EBM) and the need for systematic use of databases like MEDLINE with more sophisticated search strategies to optimize the retrieval of relevant papers. Describes an empirical study of hospital libraries that examined requests for information and search strategies using both structured and unstructured forms.…

Discusses similarity measures that are used in information retrieval to improve precision and recall ratios and presents a combined vector-based distance and angle measure to make similarity measurement more scientific and accurate. Suggests directions for future research. (LRW)

Develops a mathematical model for fitting the retrieval runs in the TREC-6 (Sixth Text REtrieval Conference) ad hoc retrieval exercise to explore how the depth of the pool of relevance judgments made for each run affects performance scores. Concurs that even on the basis of analyses of individual systems, the pool depth of 100 used by TREC is…

This two-part article combines a comprehensive account of a probabilistic model of retrieval with new systematic experiments on TREC (Text Retrieval Conferences) Program material. Part 1 covers the foundations and the model development for document collection and relevance data, along with the test apparatus. Data and results tables for both parts…

A comprehensive account of a probabilistic model of retrieval with new systematic experiments on TREC (Text Retrieval Conferences) Program material. Part 2 covers the further development of the model, with testing, and briefly considers other environment conditions and tasks, model training, concluding with comparisons with other approaches and an…

Discussion of finding relevant documents in electronic document collections focuses on an evaluation of the Kea automatic keyphrase extraction algorithm which was developed by members of the New Zealand Digital Library Project. Results are based on evaluations by human assessors of the quality and appropriateness of Kea keyphrases. (Author/LRW)

Describes the MultiText information retrieval system that finds arbitrary passages of text, as opposed to complete documents, that are likely to be relevant. Discusses relevance ranking, term expansion, interactive user interface, and distributed searching used in experiments for TREC-6 (Text Retrieval Conference) in the ad hoc, high precision,…

Describes an experiment in automatic categorization, which is based on the vector model, widely used in information retrieval. Shows how the construction of the class patterns was carried out. Discusses the evaluation measures adopted and results obtained in the automatic categorization of a collection of documents in Spanish. Describes the manual…

Although there is a proliferation of information available on the Web, and law professors, students, and other users have a variety of channels to locate information and complete their research activities, the law library catalog still remains an important source for offering users access to information that has been evaluated and cataloged by…

Purpose: This paper aims to provide an initial understanding of the constraints that historical video collections pose to video retrieval technology and the potential that online access offers to both archive and users. Design/methodology/approach: A small and unique collection of videos on customs and folklore was used as a case study. Multiple…

Following the rapid development of Internet, particularly web page interaction technology, distant e-learning has become increasingly realistic and popular. To solve the problems associated with sharing and reusing teaching materials in different e-learning systems, several standard formats, including SCORM, IMS, LOM, and AICC, etc., recently have…

The present study examines the King Saud University Repository (KSUR) and explores how documents are collected, classified, curated and preserved, and how the digital content is accessed. Although the repository has a total of 48789 file URL's, the proportion of faculty's full-text publications contained in the repository is very small. Faculty…

Hardware and software filters, which sift through keywords placed in Internet search engines and online databases, work to limit the return of information from these sources. By their very purpose, filters exist to decrease the amount of information researchers can access. The purpose of this study is to gain insight into the perceptions key…