Excessive college course withdrawals are costly to the student and the institution in terms of time to degree completion, available classroom space, and other resources. Although generally well quantified, detailed analysis of the reasons given by students for course withdrawal is less common. To address this, a text mining analysis was performed…

Techniques, media, and systems for making organized data available exist, but have not been used extensively enough. Reasons for failure to use these are explored and recommendations made for extraction by authors at time of writing, centralized organization, and publication through existing organization. Datum signatures are described. (50…

Broad coverage is essential to the effectiveness of information services. This paper criticizes the misleading claims made regarding computer-based systems in this context. It describes the Scientific Documentation Centre's services, the basis on which its resources are allocated, and the criteria for selection of operating techniques and…

The first part of the paper deals with statute law and describes the inadequacy of the official Statutes Revised' system for maintaining up-to-date records. There is a similar lack of official retrieval tools for tracing information on case law. The problems of factual information retrieval are dealt with briefly. (Author/NH)

This study of ranking algorithms used in a Boolean environment is based on an evaluation of factors affecting document ranking by information retrieval systems. The algorithms were decomposed into term weighting schemes and similarity measures, representatively selected from those known to exist in information retrieval environments, before being…

Discusses information systems in which information use becomes the prime design factor rather than technology and content. Highlighted topics include the change of useless data to productive knowledge, a value-added process; environments in which problems requiring information exist; and users' perceptions of the benefits and costs of using…

User perception of data importance and the economic feasibility of hardware and storage devices will determine the future direction of online systems. A retrieval system's functions are ultimately dictated by database design. Early online sytems were designed for bibliographic information limited to citations only using sequential files. When…

Examines the workings of the existing system of computer data bases for technical and scientific information in the United States and raises questions about developing a public national information network. (JMF)

This guide discusses four types of microcomputer-based communication programs that could prove useful to evaluators: (1) the direct communication of information generated by one computer to another computer; (2) using the microcomputer as a terminal to a mainframe computer to input, direct the analysis of, and/or output data using a statistical…

Counseling center efforts to establish and maintain relevant effectiveness in the services they offer, must be based on valid and reliable feedback from critical sources. Record keeping and data collection are the procedures by which this feedback can be acquired if they are designed to answer questions and do not become ends in themselves. A…

Presents abstracts that discuss using data visualization for information retrieval and data mining, including immersive information space and spatial metaphors; spatial data using multi-dimensional matrices with maps; TREC (Text Retrieval Conference) experiments; users' information needs in cartographic information retrieval; and users' relevance…

This study was conducted because it was felt that it might provide information leading to specific improvement of the Brigham Young University Department of Home Study; serve as a general pattern for systems studies in other university correspondence departments; and prove to be of value in defining methods that could be applied to educational…

The first two parts of the report describe some attributes of the information process and of various information handling systems. Recommendations to the technical community include: (1) The technical community must recognize that handling of technical information is a worthy and integral part of science; (2) The individual author must accept more…

A project is being conducted to test the feasibility of an information storage and retrieval system for museum specimen data, particularly for natural history museums. A pilot data processing system has been developed, with the specimen records from the national collections of birds, marine crustaceans, and rocks used as sample data. The research…

A description of the system used by Space Documentation Service (SDS) to disseminate combined and accumulated knowledge, as widely as possible, throughout Europe is given. The RECON network, with the full support of NASA, has gradually been extended so that centers in Member States, may, by installing their own terminals, have direct access to the…