Addresses concerns of museum informatics as an application domain and calls for new methods in information science as a whole. Topics include the design of museum spaces; information retrieval methods; multimedia integration; social interaction and the World Wide Web; tools of virtuality; and technology and the Americans with Disabilities Act.…

Discusses indexing in large text databases, approximate text searching, and space-time tradeoffs for indexed text searching. Studies the space overhead and retrieval times as functions of the text block size, concludes that an index can be sublinear in space overhead and query time, and applies the analysis to the Web. (Author/LRW)

A survey was conducted to test the coverage of search engines and to decide whether their partial coverage is an obstacle to using them to calculate Web impact factors. Results indicate that search engine coverage, even of large national domains, is extremely uneven and would be likely to cause misleading calculations. (Author/AEF)

Describes the GEM (Gateway to Educational Materials) project that was developed to provide retrieval of lesson plans and teacher guides on the Internet <http://www.thegateway.org>. Discusses the development of a metadata set for controlled description based on the Dublin Core, distributing GEM metadata on the World Wide Web, and future…

Introduces some of the considerations behind the teaching of research methodology at the Royal School of Library and Information Science (Denmark) at the masters level. Discusses information retrieval experiments; sampling problems; the concept of a model; and statistical analysis and its role in information retrieval experiments. (Contains 25…

Discusses the evaluation of interactive information retrieval (IIR) systems and explains two main approaches, system-driven and user-centered. Describes Text Retrieval Conference (TREC), and concludes that the simulated work task situation as an experimental sub-component could be recommended for future evaluation of IIR systems based on empirical…

Feedback from 30 of 65 physicians who participated in a computer workshop indicated that 8 had bought new hardware/software and 17 increased their use of computers, especially for Internet information retrieval and electronic mail. Those who had not increased use cited lack of time or lack of belief in their usefulness. (SK)

Indexing is the preprocessing of information to enable its retrieval, ranging from classification-based (precoordinate) to keyword searching (postcoordinate) approaches. This article describes a framework for modelling information retrieval systems in terms of sets of objects, relationships, and functions and discusses the application of indexing…

Grounded on object filtering, automatic indexing, and co-occurrence analysis, an experiment was performed using a parallel supercomputer to analyze over 400,000 abstracts in an INSPEC computer engineering collection. A user evaluation revealed that system-generated thesauri were better than the human-generated INSPEC subject thesaurus in concept…

Although web browser caching speeds up retrieval, reduces network traffic, and decreases the load on servers and browser's computers, an unintended consequence for marketing research is that Web servers undercount hits. This article explores counting problems, caching, proxy servers, trawler software and presents a series of correction factors…

Discusses the development of online courses in higher education and the use of the Web for new modes of communication and information retrieval. Describes a study that examined instructional design for Web-based instruction and suggests implications for the conceptualization of a collaborative model for the design of online courses. (LRW)

This article examines technology tools and strategies that enhance the process of conducting a comprehensive review of the literature. Strategies for accessing digital resources include: identify key words, identify appropriate databases, execute the search, and document the results. Seven strategies to consider when executing a search are…

Evaluates the similarity of six statistical association measures in information retrieval by comparing the relationship and behavior they demonstrate in analyses of a test corpus. Highlights include comparisons of ranked term pairs and term clusters, multidimensional scaling, and the impact of term frequency on the association values by means of a…

Describes research conducted at the TREC (Text Retrieval Conference) interactive track that compared Boolean and natural language searching, showing they achieved comparable results; and assessed the validity of batch-oriented retrieval evaluations, showing that the results from batch evaluations were not comparable to those obtained in…

This guide to the Internet for educators and parents of gifted children covers e-mail, talk, listservs, news groups, bulletin boards, Telnet, Gopher, World Wide Web, Mosaic, Netscape, file transfer protocol, and WAIS (Wide Area Information Service). Examples of sites for educators are included throughout the article. (DB)