Review of the 1991 literature on subject access in online systems discusses users and subject searching; subject access in online catalogs, including improvement of the database, search processing, the user interface, and user understanding; subject cataloging and indexing; information retrieval; thesaurus and indexing approaches; classification;…

Discusses problems encountered in creating a subject thesaurus for the "Ethnographic Bibliography of North America" that is adequate for both print and CD-ROM formats. Topics discussed include postcoordination versus precoordination of terms; precision and recall; natural language versus controlled vocabulary; free-text searching; and…

Describes a feasibility study which focused on converting Japanese-American evacuation and relocation photographs to digital format for improved access and preservation. Problems and issues surrounding indexing the collection, the use of Library of Congress Subject Headings and authority files, and public service issues raised by a digital image…

Presents a method of modeling the relevance relationship in information retrieval to answer the question of the theoretical limits of certain statistical methods. Hypergeometric probability distribution is used to construct an abstract model of a database of MEDLINE records, and results of tests of vector retrieval methods are reported. (28…

This survey of 1037 World Wide Web objects on polymer chemistry collected by four search engines (AltaVista, Lycos, Excite, Webcrawler) examined document information and use of meta fields, images, and chemical names. Found that the use of meta fields was not widespread and that knowledge of meta fields in HTML varied among Web object creators.…

Character strings were planted in a World Wide Web site (Project Whistlestop) to test indexing and retrieval rates of five Web search tools (Lycos, infoseek, AltaVista, Yahoo, Excite). It was found that search tools indexed few of the planted character strings, none indexed the META descriptor tag, and only Excite indexed into the 3rd-4th site…

Explores the indirect method of locating for indexing the likely explicit and implicit captions of photographs, using multimodal clues including the specific words used, syntax, surrounding layout of the Web page, and general appearance of the associated image. The MARIE-3 system thus avoids full image processing and full natural-language…

Offers practical tips on how to develop and manage a visual library collection. Highlights include: acquisitions; selection criteria and decision making; documentation; licensing and rights; access, standard vocabularies, and issues in applying terms; skills needed to index pictures; storing images; connecting images with documentation; access…

With minimal staff and a small expenditure on software, Lane Memorial Library in Hampton, New Hampshire, created a publicly accessible index to its local newspapers on its Web site. Reference staff members perform the indexing during slow times at the desk using Filemaker Pro software and the indexing guidelines and thesaurus developed in-house.…

Discussion of changes in scholarly communication due to the World Wide Web focuses on a comparison of two views of information production and use in computer-related research based on citation analysis of publications on the Web using autonomous citation indexing and a parallel citation analysis of traditional journal literature. (Author/LRW)

Presents a metric for comparing the performance of common classes of Internet information retrieval tools, including human indexed catalogs of Web resources and automatically indexed databases of Web pages. The benefit of the proposed metric is that it is relevance-based, and it facilitates the comparison of the performance of different classes of…

The term "grade descriptors" has commonly been used to refer to the practice of describing for students characteristic work that would merit different grades. This paper reports the results of a phenomenographic study on the different ways that academic staff understood and practised grade descriptors as forms of standards-based assessment. Four…

The accelerating rate of data generation and resulting publications are taxing the ability of scientific investigators to stay current with the emerging literature. This problem, acute in science, is not uncommon in other areas. New approaches to managing this explosion of information are needed. While it is only possible to read one paper or…

This thesaurus identifies nearly 4,000 subject heading terms that pertain specifically to the 41 countries that make up Africa south of the Sahara. The process of identifying these terms began with a search through the "Library of Congress Subject Headings," followed by searches of other subject heading materials and bibliographic…

This study evaluates the "Education Resources Information Center" (ERIC), "Library and Information Science Abstracts" (LISA), and "Library Literature" (LL) databases, determining how long the databases take to enter records (indexing delay), how much duplication of effort exists among the three databases (indexing…