Even in the age of Google, digital repositories can add tremendous value to an institution. Yet creating and maintaining these collections is no small task. Digital repository advocates will concede that the challenges in building and maintaining these collections can daunt even the most intrepid supporters. Three repository directors share their…

Digital library is commonly seen as a type of information retrieval system which stores and accesses digital content remotely via computer networks. However, the vision of digital libraries is not limited to technology or management, but user experience. This book is an attempt to share the practical experiences of solutions to the operation of…

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…

The difference between pertinence and relevance is discussed. Other pairs of terms and the differences between their members are examined, and the suggestion is made that such studies could increase our understanding of the theory of information systems, and thence lead to practical improvements. (Author)

It would be very helpful in retrieval experiments if good retrieval performance for a test collection was known, so that performance for particular devices could be fully evaluated. This paper presents one performance yardstick, based on optimally weighted request terms, and illustrates its application to different test collections. (Author)

Term relevance weighting systems in interactive information retrieval are reviewed. An experiment in which information retrieval users ranked query terms in decreasing order of presumed importance prior to actual search and retrieval is described. (Author/KP)

Farradane's relational indexing appeared applicable to the scientific area of the properties of metals and gave good results with a greater depth of indexing. (Author/PF)

Entropies of surrogates such as citations, abstracts, first paragraphs, last paragraphs, and first and last paragraphs are measures of how well each class of surrogates predicts relevancy of documents. They are measures of meaningful information in the text of surrogates. Such measures of information are important to information system designers.…

The Marczewski-Steinhaus metric provides what appears to be an objective general measure of retrieval effectiveness within the framework of set theory and the theory of metric spaces. (19 references) (Author/SJ)

The use of Boolean not" logic in selective dissemination of information produced greater user satisfaction, less nonpertinent information, and no apparent decrease in the number of pertinent retrievals. (9 references) (SJ)

The author distinguished between relevance and pertinence as applied to information retrieval. (6 references) (SJ)