Examines electronic full-text literature available on the World Wide Web and on CD-ROM. Discusses authors and genres, electronic texts, and fees. Highlights Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and nature writing. Provides a bibliography of Web guides, specialized Shakespeare pages, and pages dealing with the Shakespeare authorship debate and secondary…

Reports on two stages of an investigation into the perceived quality of online databases. Presents data from 989 questionnaires from 600 database users in 12 European and Scandinavian countries and results of a test of the SERVQUAL methodology for identifying user expectations about database services. Lists statements used in the SERVQUAL survey.…

Database Tomography (DT) is a system which includes algorithms for extracting multi-word phrase frequencies and performing phrase proximity analyses on any type of large textual database. DT was used to derive technical intelligence from a near-earth space (NES) database derived from the Science Citation Index and the Engineering Compendex.…

Proposes a composite feature measure which combines the shape and color features of an image based on a clustering technique. A similarity measure computes the degree of match between a given pair of images; this technique can be used for content-based image retrieval of images using shape and/or color. Tests the technique on two image databases;…

Describes the concentration of poor and minority populations in public housing in the United States, and examines the relationship between the location of public housing and changes in neighborhood poverty rates through a longitudinal database for four large U.S. cities. In each city, a significant relationship can be traced. (SLD)

Used the PsycLIT database to study six methods of computing the scholarly productivity of authors. Findings for 323 counseling-psychology faculty indicate the advisability of using simple publication totals, because the psychometric properties of more labor-intensive methods are not known, and ethical guidelines for including coauthors are neither…

Discusses the use of women researchers' birth names or hyphenated birth and marriage names in professional publications. Examines publication policies which can inhibit dissemination of their published works as well as impact on tenure and promotion decision. Offers suggestions to improve indexing of their research. (MMU)

Examines moments in the course of informal medical encounters between English health visitors and mothers in which motherhood and medicine collide. Within the conversations, motherhood, medicine, and morality are yoked to the interaction order that is inflected and influenced by the medical context of the encounters. The paper discusses motherhood…

Outlines design of an open computer system that relies on distributed computing for collection and storage of data from very large samples. Purpose of the system is to provide a base of reliable data for assessing impact of technology on delivery of educational materials. The system consists of an open instrument that generates student forms, an…

Investigates how to improve the performance of an Arabic Information Retrieval System (Arabic-IRS) by imposing the retrieval method, Mixed Stemming, over individual words of a query depending on the importance of the word, the stem or the root of the query terms in the database. This method computes term importance using a Term Frequency and…

The TeachNet Project expands the successful mentoring model developed by IMPACT-II, The Teachers Network. Project components include identifying teachers to serve as trainers, awarding grants, and developing an online database of innovative activities. The TeachNet Web site offers access to a database of curriculum resources and interactive…

Discussion of how student teachers build concrete concepts and defined concepts in telecommunication environments focuses on a study that used the AskERIC database to demonstrate the role of intellectual skills in developing conceptualizations, to compare and contrast elements of a lesson plan, and to define the role of telecommunication in…

Based on analysis of a computer corpus of 80 research articles and interviews with experienced writers, this study investigates the contextual variability of citations in eight disciplines and suggests how textual conventions point to distinctions in ways knowledge is negotiated and confirmed within different academic communities. (Author/VWL)

Stresses the importance of common understandings of cost definitions and data collection in order to create reliable databases with optimal utility for inter-institutional analysis. Examines definitions of common expenditure categories, discusses cost-accumulation rules governing financial reporting, and explains differences between direct costs…

Describes a method for measuring research information from thematic references such as headings and subheadings that are used in indexing, cataloging, and online searching, using the Rasch model as the measuring instrument. Discusses results of a search of anesthesiology in the Medline database that was used as a case study. (Author/LRW)