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Discusses the impact of HyperCard on libraries, issues surrounding its application, design considerations, and its application in a commercial product, Culture 1.0 as an example of information potential and problems. Surmises that librarians′ views of technology are the critical issue, the quality of the information contained by technology being more important than the technology itself.

This article has been withdrawn as it was published elsewhere and accidentally duplicated. The original article can be seen here: 10.1108/EUM0000000003765. When citing the article, please cite: Martin Dillon Erik Jul Mark Burge Carol Hickey, (1993), “Assessing Information on the Internet: Toward Providing Library Services for Computer-Mediated Communication”, Internet Research, Vol. 3 Iss 1.

OCLC recently completed a research project to measure the contribution to retrieval effectiveness of adding abstracts and tables of contents to bibliographic records. The most accepted evaluation measurements in information retrieval research are recall and precision. Recall is the percentage of relevant documents in a collection that are retrieved for some query. Precision is the percentage of retrieved documents that are relevant. The Findings indicate that the addition of content‐bearing information in bibliographic records will improve the overall retrieval effectiveness of library catalogs. However, the improvement is primarily in terms of recall. Precision will suffer as more content‐bearing information is added to records.

With improved analytic methods, electronic tools are becoming practical to help library managers assess investments and improve their collecting programs within a given budget. Collection managers can use them to set goals, estimate costs, and review progress. One such tool is under development at OCLC. The Office of Research at OCLC, under the direction of Martin Dillon, has developed a prototype that draws on OCLC's bibliographic and holdings database and uses a compact disk. My description of this experimental analysis tool is pro tem as OCLC's design is still evolving. It deals with patterns in library collections and should prove useful to libraries employing the Conspectus or participating in the National Collections Inventory Program. Indeed, the OCLC prototype will involve significantly less effort and yield significantly more subtle reports than former methods.

The Fully Automatic Syntactically‐based Indexing of Text (FASIT) system represents the contents of a document without a full parse or semantic analysis of the text. Content‐bearing units are isolated and then grouped into quasi‐synonymous classes whose main term is used to index the document. Previous experiments with FASIT demonstrated its usefulness in an associational retrieval environment; the experiment described here explores FASIT's value as a book‐indexing system. It is difficult to avoid the conclusion that this indexing approach offers the promise of being practical and effective.

Reports on a project to: first, provide an empirical analysis of textual information on the Internet; second, to test the suitability of cataloguing rules and record formats governing the creation of machine‐readable cataloguing records; and third, develop recommendations that would assist the efforts of standards bodies and others interested in systematically cataloguing or otherwise describing and providing access to electronic information objects available through remote network access. Provides summary tables regarding the growth of the Internet and its traffic, together with file types. Concludes: first, that machine readable cataloguing records should be created; second, the effectiveness of records created for providing description and access information should be monitored; and third, cataloguing rules and formats should be extended to include interactive network systems and services.

A technique is described for automatic reformulation of boolean queries. Based on patron relevance judgements of an initial retrieval, prevalence measures are derived for terms appearing in the retrieved set of documents that reflect a term's distribution among the relevant and non‐relevant documents. These measures are then used to guide the construction of a boolean query for a subsequent retrieval. To illustrate the technique, a series of tests is described of its application to a small data base in an experimental environment. Results compare favourably with feedback as employed in a SMART‐type system. More extensive testing is suggested to validate the technique.

A summary of OCLC's strategic plan that will guide the organization in the years ahead is set forth in a new brochure, “Journey to the 21st Century.”