Describes the evolution of computerized information storage and retrieval from its mid-nineteenth century beginnings in theoretical works on logic by George Boole, to the applications of Boole's logic to switching circuits by Claude Shannon in the 1930s, to the development of coordinate indexing by Mortimer Taube in the 1940s and 1950s. (Contains…

Describes research that was conducted to determine and then compare which Anglo American Cataloging 2 (AACR2) rules were used to assign access points for random samples of monographs in chemistry and in economics. Implications for automatic cataloging using expert systems are explored, and suggestions for further studies are given. (10 references)…

Discusses problems encountered with the syntactic analysis of free text documents in indexing. Postcoordination and precoordination of terms is discussed, an automatic indexing system call COPSY (context operator syntax) that uses natural language processing techniques is described, and future developments are explained. (60 references) (LRW)

Discusses topics related to use of search trees to enhance subject searching in online catalogs: subject searching in existing systems; search trees defined; highlights of a study of subject queries; normalized subject headings; the exact approach to subject searching; one-word queries; multiword queries; queries failing to produce retrievals; and…

Describes the development of Java-based software to use controlled vocabularies and subject headings in the cataloging of Web-based HTML articles on a subject-specific legal resources Web site. Topics include requirements for cataloging and for searching; data structure; software required; and metadata with Dublin Core requirements. (LRW)

Reports on work at the University of California, Berkeley, on the design and development of English-language indices to metadata vocabularies. Discusses the significance of unfamiliar metadata and describes the Entry Vocabulary Module which helps searchers to be more effective and increases the return on the original investment in generating…

This study examines publishing and indexing patterns in the area of digital libraries to identify the core journals and the most effective descriptor terms for online searching. Results show that indexing is inconsistent and subject searching is unreliable for full retrieval. (Author/LRW)

Discussion of information retrieval and automatic indexing in digital libraries focuses on Chinese indexing and cross-lingual information retrieval. Investigates the combination and boundary detection approaches based on mutual information for word segmentation, using lexical and statistical information. Reports results of experiments that…

Discusses access to editorial cartoons, including the importance and worth of editorial cartoons; sources, including newspapers, museums, and special cartoon collections; indexing and classification; subject access; indexing by illustrator and subject; technology and access, including digital data; access to special collections; and access to…

Work has been performed on a fully automated approach for the general categorization of documents based on a training set of document titles and abstracts and journal-level indexing of the journals in which the documents are published. The goal of this research is to automatically index documents using a consistent, timely set of controlled…

Presents three different statistical techniques for identifying content-bearing phrases within a natural language database. Describes results on the effectiveness of the scoring methods when applied to MEDLINE phrases, and how the three methods can be combined to improve performance. Processing results for an example document are provided.…

Explores the interrelation between Web publishing and information retrieval technologies and lists new approaches to Web indexing and searching. Highlights include Web directories; search engines; portalisation; Internet service providers; browser providers; meta search engines; popularity based analysis; natural language searching; links-based…

Continues previous research on indirect-collective referencing (ICR) in physics literature, focusing on the level of communications and specific degree of documentedness of a communication. Explains ICR as a special kind of scientific referencing, mentioning references that are not indexed and hence not included in the Science Citation Index. (LRW)

Discusses problems when searching the Web for financial information and presents a personal agent that utilizes user profiles and user relevance feedback to search for Chinese Web financial news articles on behalf of users. Explains the development of a Chinese indexing component and describes experiments that measured the performance of the…

Describes EquiX, a search language for XML that combines querying with searching to query the data and the meta-data content of Web pages. Topics include search engines; a data model for XML documents; search query syntax; search query semantics; an algorithm for evaluating a query on a document; and indexing EquiX queries. (LRW)