Describes recent work to provide a filtering service for readers interested in medically related news articles from online news sources. The first task is to filter out nonmedical news items; the remaining articles are then assigned MeSH headings for context and then further categorized by intended audience level. (Author/LRW)

Proposes a variable-based framework for multi-document summarization of dissertation abstracts in the fields of sociology and psychology that makes use of the macro- and micro-level discourse structure of dissertation abstracts as well as cross-document structure. Provides a list of indicator phrases that denote different aspects of the problem…

Presents preliminary results from a survey of how women in information technology professions use information sources. Investigates the effects of perceived source accessibility and perceived source quality on the selection and use of information sources. Discusses results of correlation analysis and regression analysis that also examined…

From a log of 1,025,910 Excite users' queries, 116,050 sexually related queries were extracted. Findings indicated that in many aspects, sexual and non-sexually-related queries exhibit significant differences in terms of duration of the session, analysis of the results of each query, and search term usage. (AEF)

Results of this study revealed that relationship, more than knowledge, may be the reason a manager is sought as an information source within a business environment. Social network mapping was used to capture a more intimate view of the information relationships within a business environment. Content analysis was used to analyze the data and to…

The Open Video Project is an ongoing effort to develop an open source digital video collection that can be used by the information retrieval, digital library, and digital video research communities and ultimately serve a broader audience. Discusses the challenges of compiling and maintaining such a collection. Describes the user interface…

Describes the use of three alternative methods for ranking films for information retrieval (IR). A large film-person incidence matrix is generated using the principle cast, directors, producers and screenwriters for each film. These attributes are used to measure film-film distances by creating a distance matrix. Distance, product distance, and…

Describes the Statistical Interactive Glossary (SIG), an enhanced glossary of statistical terms supported by the GovStat ontology of statistical concepts. Presents a conceptual framework whose components articulate different aspects of a term's basic explanation that can be manipulated to produce a variety of presentations. The overarching…

Reports preliminary results of a study to develop and automate new metrics for assessment of information quality in text documents, particularly in news. Through focus group studies, quality judgment experiments, and textual feature extraction and analysis, nine quality aspects were generated and applied in human assessments. Experiments were…

Textual properties of documents were analyzed to identify predictive variables for various document qualities by means of statistical and linguistic methods. A collection of 1000 documents was created, and each document was judged in terms of nine document qualities (accuracy, reliability, objectivity, depth, author/producer credibility,…

This pilot study was conducted to determine the feasibility of using PDAs (personal digital assistants or palm pilots) as a data collection device in studying information seeking behaviors of undergraduate students. Discusses results that shows heavy use of Internet search engines and that most information searches do not extend beyond the first…

In this study, it is indicated that there is a statistically significant semantic relationship between highly cited publications and their citing publications in comparison to highly cited publications with no citing relationship, within the same topic literature. Visualizing this set of data, however, shows that citation-based data represents…

Examines situations/purposes users have for searching the Web and perceptions of the textual features that assist users in characterizing documents/text retrieval in actual Web searches. The study employs a bottom-up approach to derive a set of genres built around actual use of the Web. After employing content-analytic techniques to derive a…

The Nonprofit Program Classification System being developed by the National Center for Charitable Statistics (NCCS) provides a way to enrich the information available on nonprofits and utilize the newly available NCCS/PRI National Nonprofit Organization database from the IRS Forms 990 filed annually by charities. It provides a method to organize…

Describes a research project designed to provide baseline data on the relationship between people's use of the public library and use of the Internet. A national survey was conducted to estimate the number of people using the library, the Internet, both, or neither, and to describe behaviors of people in each segment related to use or nonuse of…