Provides a preliminary report of a multi-phase research study currently in progress about accidental discovery of information (information encountering) on the Web. Presents an introductory overview of the concept of information encountering and its research, explores this concept as it pertains to electronic environments, and summarizes two…

Provides an overview of recent developments relating to the application of thesauri in information organization and retrieval on the World Wide Web. Discusses recent thesaurus projects; types of thesauri on the Web; thesauri integrated within databases and information retrieval systems; multiple thesaurus systems; standards for electronic…

Highlights the recent development of dynamic archival strategies for managing and achieving intellectual control over records. Discussion includes a definition of archival description; standards of archival description; the Australian "series" system approach to description and intellectual control of records; metadata and recordkeeping…

Discussion of search strategy in information retrieval by end users focuses on the role played by strategic reasoning and design principles for user interfaces. Highlights include strategic help based on collaborative coaching; a conceptual model for strategic help; and a prototype knowledge-based system named FIRE. (Author/LRW)

Describes an alternative method for indexing images in an image database. The method consists of manually indexing a selected reference image, and then using retrieval by graphical content to automatically transfer the manually assigned index terms from the reference image to the images to be indexed. (AEF)

Discusses evidence-based decision making; describes techniques to support evidence-based retrieval in the field of medicine which emphasize the retrieval and application of high quality knowledge to solve real-world problems; and considers the transferability of evidence-based information seeking to other fields. (Contains 69 references.) (LRW)

Discusses relationships between the frequency-based characteristics of neighboring terms in natural language and the rank or frequency of the terms. Topics include information theory measures, including expected mutual information measure (EMIM); entropy and rank; Luhn's model of term aboutness; Zipf's law; and implications for indexing and…

Suggests the use of intelligent agents for the personalized filtering of WWW (World Wide Web) pages and describes the development of a system to satisfy the user's need for information while reducing the amount of information the user has to deal with through relevance feedback. (Author/LRW)

Reviews the state of research in text mining, focusing on newer developments. The intent is to describe the disparate investigations currently included under the term text mining and provide a cohesive structure for these efforts. A summary of research identifies key organizations responsible for pushing the development of text mining. A section…

Addresses the measurement of bias in search engines on the Web, defining bias as the balance and representation of items in a collection retrieved from a database for a set of queries. Assesses bias by measuring the deviation from the ideal of the distribution produced by a particular search engine. (Author/LRW)

Library Web teams invest significant time and energy trying to create usable Web sites. Despite the ongoing efforts to make them more friendly, studies have shown that visitors have difficulty using library sites to locate journal articles. This article discusses how library web developers have tackled the particular problem of helping Web site…

Search engines have been developed for helping learners to seek online information. Based on theory of planned behaviour approach, this research intends to investigate the behaviour of using search engines as a learning tool. After factor analysis, the results suggest that perceived satisfaction of search engine, search engines as an information…

The facilitative effect of expertise in hypertext information retrieval (IR) tasks has been widely reported in related literature. However, recent theories of human expertise question the robustness of this result, since previous works have not fully considered the interaction between user and system characteristics. In this study, the constraint…

Alert services are a great way of keeping abreast of topics that interest you. Rather than searching the Web regularly to find new content about your areas of interest, an alert service keeps you informed by sending you notices when new material is added to the Web that matches your registered search criteria. Alert services are examples of push…

This article analyzes the concept of the Invisible Web and its implication for academic librarianship. It offers a guide to tools that can be used to mine the Invisible Web and discusses the benefits of using the Invisible Web to promote interest in library services. In addition, the article includes an expanded definition, a literature review,…