This book focuses on what it feels like and what it means to spend substantial portions of one's everyday life in the chat rooms, support groups, and virtual communities of cyberspace. Interviewing heavy users online, and becoming one herself, the author creates and ethnographic site for inquiring into the meanings of life online, a place where…

Eight studies by experts in the field of information retrieval examine aspects of public use of such automated systems as online catalogs in libraries. Ward Shaw discusses "Design Principles for Public Access," outlining desirable characteristics of an information retrieval system. Allen Avner and H. George Friedman, Jr. treat problems…