Introduces a personalization approach in a traditional information retrieval system. Describes extensions of integrating collaboration in personalization in the Web retrieval environment, based on differences in the nature of documents, users and search tasks between traditional and Web retrieval environments. Presents a user-oriented evaluation…

These two articles discuss clustering structure in the Cystic Fibrosis Document Collection, which is derived from the National Library of Medicine's MEDLINE file. The exhaustivity of four subject representations and two citation representations is examined, and descriptor-weight thresholds and similarity thresholds are used to compute…

Describes SAPHIRE, an experimental information retrieval system featuring concept-based automated indexing, natural language input, and relevance-based retrieval; and compares its retrieval effectiveness with other indexing approaches in a Boolean-based searching environment. Indexing in MEDLINE is described, and a test collection of AIDS…

Study results indicate that it is feasible to develop automatic name recognition algorithms to distinguish character strings representing names from other character strings occurring in English language titles. This finding offers cautious promise for alleviating some of the labor intensive work of cataloging. (16 references) (Author/SD)

Discussion of the information-seeking behavior of humanists focuses on a study that investigated the efficacy of following bibliographic references from documents already known. Topics include the nature of humanities research; vocabulary control and indexing; subject-based literature searches; seed documents; relevance; retrieval based on…

Includes eight articles that discuss issues related to special corporate libraries in Australia. Highlights include change, competition, and marketing; customer service in a value-added information environment; the need for librarians to organize and locate relevant information; and health libraries. (LRW)

Describes a study of the retrieval results of World Wide Web search engines. Research quantified accurate matches versus matches of arguable quality for 200 subjects relevant to undergraduate curricula. Both "evaluative" engines (Magellan, Point Communications) and "nonevaluative" engines (Lycos, InfoSeek, AltaVista) were…

Investigates the regions across a distribution of users' relevance judgments. A multidimensional instrument was designed using four scales for collecting, measuring, and describing end-user relevance judgments, and was administered to 21 end-users who conducted searches on their own information problems and made relevance judgments on a total of…

Reports end-users' ratings of the relative importance of 40 relevance criteria as used in their own information-seeking situations, and examines relationships between criteria that they rated most important. A model of relevance with three constructs that contribute to the concept of relevance was proposed using 11 criteria that survey respondents…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to present a computational approach and a toolset to infer spatial displacements as they occur in route narrative documents and report on first experiments done to produce computer-aided learning (CAL) applications and instructional design editors that exploit the inferred georeferenced itineraries.…

THE FOLLOWING IS THE FULL TEXT OF THIS DOCUMENT: As the number of software programs grows--and current estimates put the number at around 30,000--identifying a particular program can be a problem. R.R. Bowker Company, the administrator of the U.S. ISBN agency, has announced one solution to the identity problem--it will assign International…

Retrieval of passages from documents rather than whole documents as units speeds both user access to wanted information and the screening out of false retrievals. Results of an experiment suggest that high quality passage retrieval services for scientists are now feasible. (Author/PF)

A brief look at a technology to integrate media and objectives by cataloging and retrieving materials by computer. (Author/HB)

Criteria for selection of data bases and data base services such as searching features, logical capacity, document delivery, output format and medium, and costs are examined. (Author)