Discussion of end-user searching of online systems focuses on a study conducted at the University of Florida College of Law to determine the usefulness of DIALOG in a law school setting. Training needs are discussed, and search techniques for DIALOG are compared with those for LEXIS and Westlaw. (Four references) (LRW)

Describes enhancements made to a hypertext information retrieval system at the National Energy Research Supercomputer Center (NERSC) called DFT (Document, Find, and Theseus). The enrichment of DFT's entry vocabulary is described, DFT and other hypertext systems are compared, and problems that occur due to the need for frequent updates are…

Compares three online databases designed for elementary school use for searching periodicals. Highlights include limiting the ability to surf the Web; print capabilities; available resources included in the database, including full text versus abstracts; user-support materials; reading levels; and ease of interface use. (LRW)

Discusses student search tools for the World Wide Web and describes and compares seven that are appropriate for pre-kindergarten through secondary school. Highlights include access; age appropriateness; directories versus full search engines; filters; limits of some tools; and adult-oriented search tools that can be limited for students' access.…

Focuses on participants' confidence in their judgments of the relevance of bibliographic records to particular research questions. Describes an empirical investigation of the association between participants' confidence and the number of categories for a relevance rating scale. Presents exploratory results involving gender effects and comparison…

Describes a new Boolean retrieval environment in which an extended soft Boolean logic is used to automatically construct queries from original natural language formulations provided by users. Experimental results that compare the retrieval effectiveness of this method to conventional Boolean and vector processing are discussed. (27 references)…

A comparison of the effectiveness of information retrieval based on full-text documents with retrieval based on paragraphs, abstracts, or controlled vocabularies was accomplished using a subset of journal articles with nine search questions. It was found that full-text retrieval achieved significantly higher recall and lower precision than did the…

POPLINE, a cooperatively produced bibliographic retrieval system offered through MEDLARS, is a comprehensive collection of the worldwide literature on population and family planning. A comparison of several medical and social science databases with POPLINE indicates that POPLINE offers the greatest depth and breadth of subject coverage in this…

Highlights the unique characteristics of NEXIS, a full-text database of newspaper, wire-service, magazine and newsletter stories, and discusses its structure, educational versus commercial rates, the old versus new price structure, and search tips. An addendum describes changes through October 1985 and detailed appendices are included. (Author/EM)

Examines online and printed equivalents of selected government documents indexes to compare the recall, precision, overlap, and cost effectiveness of online and manual searching. Indexes studied were the Monthly Catalog, CIS (Congressional Information Service) Index, and Government Reports Announcements and Index. (CLB)

Two subject profiles (social welfare direct practice and management) were used to search 13 social science databases in order to examine extent of online coverage of social welfare literature. Journal coverage data for 20 titles were obtained and most recent citations were retrieved to compare currency of indexing (5 references). (EJS)

In this study, automatic feedback techniques are applied to Boolean query statements in online information retrieval to generate improved query statements based on information contained in previously retrieved documents. Feedback operations are carried out using conventional Boolean logic and extended logic. Experimental output is included to…

Reports on comparative study of document classifications produced by use of single linkage, complete linkage, group average, and Ward clustering methods. Findings of work that compares use of clusters consisting of pairs of documents with conventional best match searches are also reported. Thirty-four references are provided. (EJS)

Considers classifications produced by application of single linkage, complete linkage, group average, and word clustering methods to Keen and Cranfield document test collections, and studies structure of hierarchies produced, extent to which methods distort input similarity matrices during classification generation, and retrieval effectiveness…

Three Web search engines--Alta Vista, Excite, and Lycos--were compared and evaluated in terms of their search capabilities and retrieval performances using sample queries drawn from real reference questions. Findings indicated Alta Vista outperformed Excite and Lycos in both search facilities and retrieval performance, although Lycos had the…