This article describes the Project Lefty, a search system that, at a minimum, adds a layer on top of traditional federated search tools that will make the wait for results more worthwhile for researchers. At best, Project Lefty improves search queries and relevance rankings for web-scale discovery tools to make the results themselves more relevant…

It is easy to lament the shortcomings of traditional online public access catalogs (OPACs) in the Google Age. Users cannot, for example, usually input a snippet of a long-forgotten pop song's chorus into an online library catalog and almost instantly retrieve a relevant result along with hundreds of other options. On the other hand, should OPACs…

Stephen Downes visits Robin Good's Master NewMedia, a Web site dedicated to Web 2.0 in both thought and deed. The site both utilizes the design principles and technologies central to the concept of Web 2.0--relentless referencing, cross-referencing, and linking to a wide variety of articles from across the Web; a fluid and often chaotic…

Educators are becoming increasingly interested in alternatives to learning management systems (LMS) Blackboard and WebCT. Stephen Downes's column Places to Go turns to one internationally popular open source LMS--Moodle. Downes takes the reader through Moodle's Web site, which is simultaneously a Web site about its LMS and an example of what its…

Four commercial World Wide Web browsers are evaluated for features such as handling of WWW protocols and different URLs: FTP, Telnet, Gopher and WAIS, and e-mail and news; bookmark capabilities; navigation features; file management; and security support. (JKP)

This study examined the use of concept maps for Web-based applications in higher education. The purpose of the project was to design concept maps that could serve as prototypes for navigating and searching Internet resources. It also explored the value of concept mapping as a method of bibliographic retrieval for the ERIC database. Following an…

Libraries subscribe to thousands of electronic journals and they are difficult for end-users to find. Journal and publisher interfaces and functionalities differ considerably. The recent development in e-media calls for central management of the resources. Lund University Libraries' Head Office has developed a service for presentation and…