Perhaps the greatest power of folksonomies, especially when set against controlled vocabularies like the Library of Congress Subject Headings, lies in their capacity to empower user communities to name their own resources in their own terms. This article analyzes the potential and limitations of both folksonomies and controlled vocabularies for…

Processing the self-relevance of information facilitates recall. Similarly, processing close-other-related information facilitates recall to a lesser degree than processing self-relevant information. This memory advantage may be viewed as an index of the degree to which the representation of self is differentiated from representations of close…

The mere fact that a library service is being used does not mean that the service makes a difference or has a positive impact on the user. This has significant implications for Special Library and Information Services (SL&IS) that have to constantly prove that they add value. Because of the difficulty of measuring impact effectively, the…

The need to educate a competitive workforce is a global problem. In the US, for example, despite billions of dollars spent to improve the educational system, approximately 35% of students never finish high school. The drop rate among some demographic groups is as high as 50-60%. At the college level in the US only 30% of students graduate from…

This article will discuss the issues concerning the storage, retrieval and use of multimedia technology in dance, and how semantic web technologies can support those requirements. It will identify the key aims and outcomes of four international telematic dance projects, and review the use of reflective practice to engage students in their learning…

With the increasing wealth of information on the Web, information integration is ubiquitous as the same real-world entity may appear in a variety of forms extracted from different sources. This dissertation proposes supervised and unsupervised algorithms that are naturally integrated in a scalable framework to solve the entity resolution problem,…

Student commons are no longer simply congregation spaces for students with time on their hands. They are integral to providing a welcoming environment and effective learning space for students. Many student commons have been transformed into spaces for socialization, an environment for alternative teaching methods, a forum for large group meetings…

This article presents a consideration of how students' existing information-seeking behaviors affect traditional methods of teaching library research in first-year writing courses and offers an alternative method that uses both library and popular Internet search tools. It addresses one aspect of the ongoing pedagogical struggle with new…

In experimental searches of "Basic Journal Abstracts" using the subject terms from 104 selective dissemination of information profiles, retrieval was found to be significantly worse if only titles were searched rather than the full title and abstract. (PF)

Poses questions concerning methods of using specificity information in a weighting scheme. (JB)

The model assumes that the relevance assigned to a document by a juror is a random variable. (PF)

A threshold rule is analyzed and compared to the Neyman-Pearson procedure, indicating that the threshold rule provides a necessary but not sufficient measure of the minimal performance of a retrieval system, whereas Neyman-Pearson yields a better apriori decision for retrieval. (Author/MBR)

The use of a structured system of storing information, particularly relational indexing, can lead to situations in which items would not be retrieved due to technicalities of the system. To overcome such problems a study was made of condensations with the aim of providing a series of rules to apply. (4 references) (Author/SJ)

There are six major studies of the effect of indexing depth on retrieval performance. They differ in purpose, methodology, measures, indexing language, field of study, and data base--nevertheless, all have found depth of indexing to have the same effect upon information retrieval. (13 references) (Author/NH)