The first Extension-authored link in Google Search (2011a) for "how to garden" was ranked an abysmal 82nd. Worse, Internet users selected the top-ranked site significantly more often than they selected the second-ranked one, and they rarely selected any site ranked lower than #10 (Granka, Joachims, & Gay, 2004). An…

The cataloging of otherwise unprocessed collections is an innovative minimal processing technique with important implications for reference service. This article mines the existing literature for how institutions engaged in minimal processing view reference, the strengths and weaknesses of catalog records as finding aids, and information about…

Federated searching was once touted as the library world's answer to Google, but ten years since federated searching technology's inception, how does it actually compare? This study focuses on undergraduate student preferences and perceptions when doing research using both Google and a federated search tool. Students were asked about their…

"The New Digital Scholar" presents innovative thinking and groundbreaking research on the challenges NextGen students face with research-writing projects. Reminding readers of the history of the academic research paper and the scope of the recent information explosion, editors McClure and Purdy open a discussion long silent in academic…

This study aimed to explore the correlates among teachers' epistemological beliefs concerning Internet environments, their web search strategies and search outcomes. The sample of this study included 105 teachers from 63 grades 1 to 9 schools in Taiwan. The results show that the teachers with more advanced epistemological beliefs concerning…

This article examines how finding aids are structured and delivered, considering alternative approaches. It suggests that single-level displays, those that present a single component of a multilevel description to users at a time, have the potential to transform the delivery and display of collection information while improving the user…

Health professionals frequently do not possess the necessary information-seeking abilities to conduct an effective search in databases and Internet sources. Reference librarians may teach health professionals these information and technology skills through the Big6 information literacy model (Big6). This article aims to address this issue. It also…

Keeping up with today's rapid technological changes reveals itself vividly in the changing ways people attempt to gather information. This article describes a survey conducted by the Weinberg Memorial Library at the University of Scranton which analyzed the information retrieval strategies employed by a cohort of undergraduate students. The…

One might assume that familiarity with a scene or previous encounters with objects embedded in a scene would benefit subsequent search for those items. However, in a series of experiments we show that this is not the case: When participants were asked to subsequently search for multiple objects in the same scene, search performance remained…

The effect of cognitive load (CL) on speech recognition has received little attention despite the prevalence of CL in everyday life, e.g., dual-tasking. To assess the effect of CL on the interaction between lexically-mediated and acoustically-mediated processes, we measured the magnitude of the "Ganong effect" (i.e., lexical bias on phoneme…

The efficacy of video-based sign language (SL) navigation aids to improve Web search for Deaf Signers was tested by two experiments. Experiment 1 compared 2 navigation aids based on text hyperlinks linked to embedded SL videos, which differed in the spatial contiguity between the text hyperlink and SL video (contiguous vs. distant). Deaf Signers'…

Finding an object in our environment is an important human ability that also represents a critical component of human foraging behavior. One type of information that aids efficient large-scale search is the likelihood of the object being in one location over another. In this study we investigated the conditions under which individuals respond to…

The purpose of this study was to investigate how federated search engines are incorporated into the Web sites of libraries in the Association of Research Libraries. In 2009, information was gathered for each library in the Association of Research Libraries with a federated search engine. This included the name of the federated search service and…

The Behavioral Interventions to Advance Self-Sufficiency (BIAS) project is the first major opportunity to use a behavioral economics lens to look at programs that serve poor and vulnerable people in the United States. Sponsored by the Office of Planning, Research and Evaluation of the Administration for Children and Families (ACF) within the U.S.…

The Local Government Association (LGA) commissioned the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) to undertake an initial scoping study into safeguarding post-Laming, with a view to undertaking further work if relevant. The purpose of the study was to identify research and literature produced since the Laming report was published in…