Reviews the literature addressing description and cataloging. Topics covered in the review include the functions and structures of catalogs; the Anglo American Cataloging Rules; application and extension of bibliographic control; authority control; shared cataloging and bibliographic networks; retrospective conversion; management topics; and the…

Introduces DACUM (a process designed to help colleges develop, update, or evaluate a curriculum or training program) and its resulting national database. Describes how DACUM can be used to justify the study of communication in most academic curricula, to guide speech communication curriculum planning and defining of the basic course, and to…

Proposes a new lock primitive called ordered sharing that allows increased concurrency in database systems. Reliability and performance issues of the proposed protocol are addressed, a simulation study that demonstrates that ordered sharing results in improved performance in database systems is described; and use in several representative database…

This article has three objectives: (1) introduce the basics of the World Wide Web (including Internet connectivity, hypertext, and uniform resource locators); (2) highlight environmental health databases on the Web; and (3) discuss possible applications of the Web for the environmental health profession. (LZ)

Edwards (1992c) concerns data and data use rather than manuals. It presents principles to facilitate reliable archive research in an imperfect world. MacWhinney and Snow (1992) endorse the principles but disagree on important details, discussed in this response. (21 references) (KM)

Following an introduction to authority control and MARC (machine readable cataloging), 10 steps are presented for making the transition from a manual to an automated authority file, keeping up with ongoing work, staying current in the discipline, and retrospective work. (23 references) (MES)

Describes several applications of data base materials that have proved useful in journalism education. Maintains that journalism graduates need electronic information gathering skills. (SR)

This paper describes the rationale for collection, digitisation, and quantitative characterization of a large multispeaker database of spoken Australian English. The speakers, all of whom were born in Australia of Australian parents, were recorded on 10 occasions over a period of months with each speaker recording a variety of speaking styles on…

Relates the special properties of videodiscs and the economics of videodisc production with the nature of second-language instruction, and suggests ways to design and use cost-effective videodiscs as aural and visual databases for a variety of instructional levels and contexts. (two references) (Author/CB)

Reports on a project showing that relational data models, including unnormalized models that allow the nesting of relations, cannot fully capture the structural properties of lexical information. A feature-based model that allows for a full representation of some nesting and defines a factoring mechanism is described and demonstrated. (38…

Describes infomapping, or the mapping of corporate information assets, as a method to manage information as an organizational resource. Attributes of Information Resource Entities (IREs), which are profiled in an information map, are described; management benefits are discussed; and the use of InfoMapper, a software tool for information mapping,…

This description of a study that monitored user selection of business and legal databases in EasyNet's multifile Scan option presents a ranked list of selected databases and discusses the effects of price, recommended database indicator, file record format, database name, and individual files on database selection. (Six references) (CLB)

The third of three articles on the NOTIS interface to locally mounted database tapes looks at the experience of the Vanderbilt University library. Topics include the system control file, master functions, database functions, terminal functions that regulate access, database maintenance, impact on the local computer system, and report features.…

This study examined the contribution to retrieval effectiveness (measured by recall and precision) of adding content-bearing information such as abstracts and tables of contents to bibliographic records. It was found that the addition of content-bearing information improves overall retrieval effectiveness. Improvement was primarily in terms of…

Discussion of computerized simulation games focuses on the organization and use of data dictionaries to support more flexible development and maintenance of game administration systems and participants' decision support systems. The roles of game designers, game administrators, and game participants are discussed. (12 references) (LRW)