The purpose of this exploratory study was to develop research methods to compare the effectiveness of two video browsing interface designs, or surrogates--one static (storyboard) and one dynamic (slide show)--on two distinct information seeking tasks (gist determination and object recognition). (AEF)

Describes a workshop program developed at the California State University Sacramento to familiarize faculty with the library's electronic resources. The broad subject areas targeted were business, humanities, social sciences, and science and technology. Training covered the online catalog, article indexes, and databases. Evaluations of the…

To mine a large store of school data, a new technology (variously termed data warehousing, data marts, online analytical processing, and executive information systems) is emerging. Data warehousing helps school districts extract and restructure desired data from automated systems and create new databases designed to enhance analytical and…

Reviews strengths and weaknesses of five optical character recognition (OCR) software packages used to digitize paper documents before publishing on the Internet. Outlines options available and stages of the conversion process. Describes the learning experience of Eurotext, a United Kingdom-based electronic libraries project (eLib). (PEN)

The Audubon Society and the Cornell Lab of Ornithology are promoting various "citizen science" projects in which amateur naturalists make local observations of birds, butterflies, or natural phenomena and report their observations to interactive databases on the World Wide Web. Events such as the Great Backyard Bird Count motivate people…

The Nonprofit Program Classification System being developed by the National Center for Charitable Statistics (NCCS) provides a way to enrich the information available on nonprofits and utilize the newly available NCCS/PRI National Nonprofit Organization database from the IRS Forms 990 filed annually by charities. It provides a method to organize…

The Education Commission of the States conducted interviews in six school districts in five different states (California, Colorado, Iowa, Maryland, and Texas) to understand how districts can use data most effectively. These districts had used data to dramatically improve student achievement. Districts that make wise use of data have strong…

How do you engage faculty in the task of developing student information literacy? This case study offers a model for incorporating information retrieval into a social science research project so that literacy becomes an intrinsic part of the course assignment. Students showed significant gains in database search and assessment skills with minimal…

Standards-based testing is a major issue impacting public education around the world. Educational publications and daily newspapers cite instances where schools are accredited, or other instances where teams of educators are being assigned to failing schools, to suggest changes for improving student learning and subsequent test scores. In some…

Like any well-run company deciding on what products and services to offer, a good library should pay attention to customer demand when it is building its business reference collection. What kind of information do business patrons want? Most are looking for company and industry details: a corporate address or name of an officer, financial data for…

Providing quality technical support in K-12 environments can be challenging. Unlike the business world, there is generally a less-than-ideal ratio of technical staff to computers, numerous software titles from dozens of vendors, and of course--a much smaller budget. The Victor Central School District in Victor, New York, has employed a number of…

One of the most beneficial uses for technology in the science classroom is data manipulation. During labs and other learning experiences, students can quickly put the data they collect into spreadsheets or databases. Then they can make comparisons, create graphs, draw conclusions, sort the data in new ways, and, ultimately, give their data…

Data mining of IPEDS data is used to develop models that calculate predicted graduation rates for two- and four-year institutions. (Contains 7 tables and 5 figures.)

Previous works in English have revealed that disfluencies follow regular patterns and that incorporating them into the language model of a speech recognizer leads to lower perplexities and sometimes to a better performance. Although work on disfluency modeling has been applied outside the English community (e.g., in Japanese), as far as we know…

Objective: The aim of this review was to explore attendance of UK exercise referral schemes (ERS), who attends them, why participants drop out of schemes and to compare evaluations of existing ERS with randomised controlled trials (RCTs). Design: Systematic review. Method: A search of major databases was conducted to identify studies investigating…