Online resources are becoming increasingly important in undergraduate education and have been associated with a number of advantages and positive outcomes on students' learning experience. However, online resource use by veterinary students for physiology learning remains poorly understood. Thus the present questionnaire-based study aims to…

With the development of e-commerce, websites such as Amazon and eBay have become very popular. Users post reviews of products and rate the helpfulness of reviews on these websites. Reviews written by a user and reviews rated by a user reflect the user's interests and disinterest. Thus, they are very useful for user profiling. In this study, the…

In recent years, smartphones and tablets have been rapidly adopted by consumers worldwide. Within the United States, a growing number of school districts have incorporated tablets into classroom instruction. As mobile technology becomes further integrated into households and classrooms, parents, teachers, and students might need information for…

Information retrieval (IR) systems have tremendously broaden users' access to information. However, users need to select their needs from trillions of information indexed daily. Due to the "semantic gap" between queries and indexed terms in IR system, whether users can satisfy their needs depends on whether they use the correct terms as…

The nature of the information seeking behaviour of the teachers engaged in General Degree Colleges and Teachers' Training Colleges affiliated to West Bengal State University, India, is critically analysed in the present study. The descriptive analysis is based on well structured, close-ended questionnaires which were distributed among 450…

Introduction: The paper presents original research designed to explore and compare selected aspects of the information seeking behaviour of mathematicians (scientists and students) on the Internet. Method: The data were gathered through a questionnaire distributed at the end of 2011 and in January 2012. Twenty-nine professional mathematicians and…

This study explored factors affecting information selection by international stakeholders working with invasive species. Despite differences in information requirements between groups, all stakeholders demonstrated a clear preference for free, easily accessible online information, and predominantly used internet search engines and specialist…

The tremendously huge volume of biomedical literature, scientists' specific information needs, long terms of multiples words, and fundamental problems of synonym and polysemy have been challenging issues facing the biomedical information retrieval community researchers. Search engines have significantly improved the efficiency and effectiveness of…

Library users' evolving information needs and their choice of search methods have changed reference work profoundly. Today's reference librarian must work in a whole new way--not only service-focused and businesslike, but even entrepreneurial. Murphy innovatively rethinks the philosophy behind current library reference services in this…

Search engines have now become essential tools in all aspects of our life. Although a variety of information needs can be served very successfully, there are still a lot of queries that search engines can not answer very effectively and these queries always make users feel frustrated. Since it is quite often that users encounter such "difficult…

Today's college students, particularly distance students, are increasingly dependent on the Web for their research needs. At the same time they lack the critical thinking skills required to successfully evaluate the actual credibility of online information, a critical aspect of information literacy. Furthermore, rather than access the online…

Purpose: This study is an attempt to develop an automatic identification method for Arabic web queries and divide them into several query types using data mining. In addition, it seeks to evaluate the impact of the academic environment on using the internet. Design/methodology/approach: The web log files were collected from one of the higher…

The evolution of the Internet and the World Wide Web continually exceeds expectations with the "swift pace" of technological innovations. Information is added, and just as quickly becomes outdated at a rapid pace. Researchers have found that Digital materials can provide access to primary source materials and connect the researcher to institutions…

In this study, students' use of a new educational Web portal was evaluated with particular emphasis on searching and browsing strategies. The effects and implications of a federated search system are also discussed. Fifty-four students, ranging from 5th to 12th grade, were given five tasks to complete using the SchoolRooms interface. The tasks…

This study examines existent and new methods for evaluating the success of information retrieval systems. The theory underlying current methods is not robust enough to allow testing retrieval using different meta-tagging schema's. Traditional measures rely on judgments of whether a document is relevant to a particular question. A good system…