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Four simulations of online services have been produced by students of the Department of Information Studies, University of Sheffield; FOSSILS, a simulation of Lockheed Dialog; BLAISERS, a simulation of BLAISE MARC information retrieval, editing MUTE, a simulation of BLAISE MEDLINE, and SSDC, a simulation of SDC. These have proved valuable in teaching use of a keyboard, basic commands and more advanced techniques. Written in BASIC, the programs have been transferred successfully to a wide range of computers including microcomputers, in several countries.

This paper describes INSTRUCT, an interactive computer program which has been developed as a teaching aid for use within schools of librarianship and information science. The program demonstrates some of the techniques that have been suggested for implementing document retrieval systems in the future, and currently runs on a search file that comprises 6,004 documents from the Library and Information Science Abstracts database. INSTRUCT has facilities for natural language query processing, including the use of a stop‐word list, a stemming algorithm and a fuzzy‐matching routine that allows the automatic identification of a range of word variants; the provision of ranked output using automatic term weighting and a nearest‐neighbour searching procedure; and automatic relevance feedback using probabilistic relevance weights. The program is menu‐driven and can be used by searchers with little or no user training.

INSTRUCT is an interactive computer program illustrating some of the techniques which have been suggested for use in future text retrieval systems. The program is designed as a computerised teaching aid for students in schools of librarianship and information science. A previous paper has provided a general overview of the novel retrieval facilities provided by INSTRUCT. The present paper discusses the means by which these facilities have been implemented: in particular, detailed descriptions are given of the nearest‐neighbour search algorithm that underlies the string similarity and ranked output modules of the program, and of the term‐weighting schemes that are used. The paper concludes with a discussion of potential enhancements to the present program.

This is the tenth article on business and law (BSL) databases in a continuing series of articles summarising and commenting on new database products. Two companion articles have appeared, one covering science, technology and medicine (STM) in Online & CDROM Review vol. 21, no. 4 and the other covering social science, humanities, news and general (SSH) in Online & CDROM Review vol. 21, no. 5. The articles are based on the newly appearing database products in the Gale Directory of Databases. The Gale Directory of Databases (GDD) was created in January 1993 by merging Computer‐Readable Databases: A Directory and Data Sourcebook (CRD) together with the Directory of Online Databases (DOD) and the Directory of Portable Databases (DPD).

The Online Search Tutor (OST) was developed under funding from the British Library Research and Development Department as a self‐contained training package for end‐users of online search services. The software package includes Computer Assisted Learning (CAL) techniques and system simulation (emulation) modules and is based on the QUEST command language of ESA‐IRS. This paper describes the structure of this package and also includes the results of a small‐scale evaluation of its use with a sample of end‐users with no previous experience of online searching. OST runs on an IBM‐PC XT microcomputer.

Discuss in detail the uses which might legitimately be made of the following passage by the writer of a profound study of economic life and thought in France at the end of the reign of Louis XIV. In answering the question make full use of your knowledge of (a) historical criticism; (b) French economic and general history.

^∗ Indicates books which are especially recommended.

Aarhus Kommunes Biblioteker (Teknisk Bibliotek), Ingerslevs Plads 7, Aarhus, Denmark. Representative: V. NEDERGAARD PEDERSEN (Librarian).

The purpose of this paper is to provide an extensive review of the monetary model of exchange rate determination which is the main theoretical framework on analyzing exchange rate behavior over the last 40 years. Furthermore, we test the flexible price monetarist variant and the sticky price Keynesian variant of the monetary model. We conduct our analysis employing a sample of 14 advanced economies using annual data spanning the period 1880–2012.

The theoretical background of the paper relies on the monetary model to the exchange rate determination. We provide a thorough econometric analysis using a battery of unit root and cointegration testing techniques. We test the price-flexible monetarist version and the sticky-price version of the model using annual data from 1880 to 2012 for a group of industrialized countries.

We provide strong evidence of the existence of a nonlinear relationship between exchange rates and fundamentals. Therefore, we model the time-varying nature of this relationship by allowing for Markov regime switches for the exchange rate regimes. Modeling exchange rates within this context can be motivated by the fact that the change in regime should be considered as a random event and not predictable. These results show that linearity is rejected in favor of an MS-VECM specification which forms statistically an adequate representation of the data. Two regimes are implied by the model; the one of the estimated regimes describes the monetary model whereas the other matches in most cases the constant coefficient model with wrong signs. Furthermore it is shown that depending on the nominal exchange rate regime in operation, the adjustment to the long run implied by the monetary model of the exchange rate determination came either from the exchange rate or from the monetary fundamentals. Moreover, based on a Regime Classification Measure, we showed that our chosen Markov-switching specification performed well in distinguishing between the two regimes for all cases. Finally, it is shown that fundamentals are not only significant within each regime but are also significant for the switches between the two regimes.

The results are of interest to practitioners and policy makers since understanding the evolution and determination of exchange rates is of crucial importance. Furthermore, our results are linked to forecasting performance of exchange rate models.

The present analysis extends previous analyses on exchange rate determination and it provides further support in favor of the monetary model as a long-run framework to understand the evolution of exchange rates.

Using an original product level database, this article analyzes the nature and dynamics of Swiss specializations during the “first globalization” (1850–1913). I study the comparative advantages, as well as the evolution of the trade structure, in order to understand economic performance differences between Switzerland and France. Despite differences in terms of market size, some common trends are identified. I also argue that Switzerland's skilled labor force, along with an intelligent choice of economic policy, allowed this country to adapt its specialization structure to global demand and enjoy rapid economic growth.