Presents findings from a study of ERIC (Educational Resources Information Center) user services and evaluation efforts of them. Identifies changes that would increase ERIC's competitive edge in the networked environment and recommends an evaluation framework for ERIC to monitor progress to its strategic goals. (LRW)

Draws on information in the Modern Language Association database to identify changes through time in registration levels and the percentage of institutions that offer various languages and language clusters and discusses trends within groups that differ by several institutional characteristics. (nine references) (CK)

Reviews information sources available on the Internet that relate to environmental issues. Topics include databases, subject specific resources, appropriate educational information, electronic journals, bulletin boards, CD-ROMs, bibliographies, government information, electronic newsletters, and listservs. (LRW)

Describes an evaluation model for expansion systems in information retrieval, i.e., systems expanding a user selection of documents to provide the user with a larger set of documents sharing the same or related characteristics. Highlights include a test protocol and evaluation measures for the efficiency of expansion systems. (Contains 29…

Discusses the use of the OCLC Authority File for answering reference questions. Contents of the authority file are described, including personal, corporate, conference, and geographic names, uniform titles, and subject headings; accessing the authority file is explained; searching strategies are discussed; and examples of authority records are…

Navigates through a gopher site and then describes some common ways to use different mathematical gophers to obtain desired information. These skills include finding, reading, and downloading text-based files, searching a database, and downloading software. (AIM)

Investigates the impact of statewide database licensing for ProQuest on the users of public, school, and community college libraries in Washington State. Results of transaction log data and a study of how communities used information indicated that the database is used mainly in education and stressed the importance of implementation and promotion…

This exploratory study provides a qualitative report on the integration of the extensive use of a large-scale hypermedia information system (Perseus) on CD-ROM in university class settings. Examines how the learners use Perseus to create their projects, and what their affective attitude and cognitive perceptions are towards hypermedia. (Contains…

Examines a non-legislative report on fair use guidelines for educational multimedia for nonprofit educational institutions. Discusses applications to distance education via the Internet; time limitations; portion limits; specific limits for different types of media, including photographs and numeric databases; and number of copies. (Author/LRW)

Discussion of aggregator databases focuses on a project at the Hong Kong Baptist University library to integrate full-text electronic journal titles from three unstable aggregator databases into its online public access catalog (OPAC). Explains the development of the electronic journal computer program (EJCOP) to generate MARC records for…

Presents an analysis of information industry alliance formation using environmental scanning methods. Highlights include why libraries and academic institutions should be interested; a literature review; historical context; industry and market structures; commercial and academic models; trends; and implications for information providers,…

Proposes a mining process to automate author co-citation analysis based on the Web Citation Database, a data warehouse for storing citation indices of Web publications. Describes the use of agglomerative hierarchical clustering for author clustering and multidimensional scaling for displaying author cluster maps, and explains PubSearch, a…

Compares support vector machines (SVMs) to Rocchio, Ide regular and Ide dec-hi algorithms in information retrieval (IR) of text documents using relevancy feedback. If the preliminary search is so poor that one has to search through many documents to find at least one relevant document, then SVM is preferred. Includes nine tables. (Contains 24…

Reviews template mining research and shows how templates are used in World Wide Web search engines and metasearch engines for helping end-users generate natural language search expressions. Potential areas of application of template mining for extraction of information from digital documents are highlighted, and how such applications are used is…

Describes a system called CINDI (Concordia INdexing and DIscovery System) for cataloging and searching documents in a distributed virtual library. The document author registers metadata in the form of a semantic header that contains information on syntactic and semantic content, and an expert system fills the semantic header according to accepted…