Search results

This survey covers 1977–78 and presents a brief overview of some of the publications that have had, and will continue to have, impact on biology. Excluded are: 1) applied areas such as agriculture, medicine, and veterinary medicine; and 2) botany. The botanical reference literature has been voluminous as usual during this period and deserves an individual review which will appear in a later issue of RSR.

One of the essential problems in scientific documentation is the establishment of relationships between:

In the past, legibility research has been mainly concerned with the conventionally typeset and printed word. ‘Printed’ materials are now produced by a variety of other methods, however, and other media such as microforms and cathode ray tubes (CRTs) are commonly used for information display. The effects of these new methods and media on legibility are often given scant consideration, but because of their visual limitations, it is all the more important that the legibility and ease of use of the information should be taken into account. The scope of legibility research must therefore be extended to cover the products of modern information technology. The aim of this paper is to summarize some of the research which has already been carried out and which is of relevance to present‐day problems, and to suggest where further research is most needed.

The possibility of having access to all the world's literature from a single computer terminal stimulated the imagination of the research workers in the late' sixties. It was this goal and the fascination of the co‐operation between man and machine, that inspired the major changes that have taken place in Information Retrieval over the past ten years.

Minicomputers provide an alternative means to access on‐line bibliographic retrieval systems. As the use of on‐line retrieval continues to grow and to spread into the nontechnical community, users and potential users will find it imperative to establish new methods to maximize the benefits of available on‐line systems. The paper explores the effects minicomputers can have on the on‐line retrieval environment. The experience at Editec indicates that minicomputers used in on‐line retrieval offer substantial benefits not possible using computer terminals, the major benefit being the increased acceptance of the on‐line search product by the end user community. Variable costs are held down to acceptable limits, the major consideration for those interested in their use being their high capital cost. The primary difference in using minicomputers rather than computer terminals is the ability to work at higher speeds. This enables many changes to be made which can affect the on‐line retrieval product. The decision to use minicomputers for on‐line retrieval entails lengthy analysis of current and projected use of on‐line retrieval within an organization, the availability of qualified staff, the costs of equipment and software development. It is hoped that some of the considerations in the paper may be helpful in analyzing these questions.

Although a large number of Chinese libraries keep some sort of electronic publications, mainly formal publications on CD‐ROM and online, the usage is quite different from one library to another. While the hardcopy business process is mature, the rules and regularities of electronic publications in libraries are under development; many business models are on a trial basis. This paper plans to investigate what and how many of these electronic materials should be bought and brought to the users, and how they are used, which are still embarrassing questions for librarians.

The authors made an inquiry into the current status of formal electronic publications, including e‐books and e‐journals at the two major library groups: public and university libraries, as found out from the explanation of the gap by literature analysis and interview.

Through the survey on a few leading libraries of China, we found the big usage gap of e‐journals in public versus university libraries in China. The factors that cause the usage difference are that public libraries have diversified reader needs, lack of general‐purpose e‐publication, inferior skill in using e‐publications, a charging service model of e‐publications, less negotiating power and pricing.

The authors believe that if the improvements outlined in the paper are introduced, then public libraries can lift their e‐publication service to a higher standard, including extension of the subject scope, building of consortia, upgrading of the reading environment, and enhancing of the user training and service.

This study aims to examine the pattern of publications, using a bibliometric analysis, of the African Journal of Library, Archives and Information Science (AJLAIS) for the period between 2000 and 2012.

The study uses appropriate measures and techniques of bibliometric analysis. Keeping the objectives of the study in mind, the data were collected from the AJLAIS covering the 13 identified years. The analysis covers mainly the number of articles published per volume in each of the specified years, the authorship patterns, the subject areas covered, the length of articles, the citation pattern of articles and the article types.

The results of the study reveal that a total of 218 articles were published in the 13-year period, with 21 (9.63 per cent) articles being the highest total in the year 2002. The study showed that the majority of the articles, i.e. 126 (57.8 per cent), were published by single authors, out of which, a large number were on information retrieval. Of the total number of articles published, 86 (39.4 per cent) were 6-10 pages in length. Volume 19 in 2009 had the highest number of citations with a total of 451 (12.4 per cent). In addition, the study revealed that the majority of the articles were theoretical papers, with a total of 108 (49.5 per cent), while the others were empirical papers, book reviews and short communications.

This bibliometric study will enlarge the knowledge base of information professionals on the present condition of library and information science (LIS) research in the current African context and provide some basis for future projections of the discipline. The study will also be helpful for librarians in the process of collection development. This is because, due to increased journal costs and slim budgets for libraries, collection development specialists must make careful selections based on the qualities and standards of journals.

Researchers who shy away from this particular type of research owing to its rigorous and time-consuming nature should gather the courage to do so. Further studies should focus on analysing journals that are published in the field of librarianship in Africa, as it will create more awareness of the field of study among other professionals or researchers who are yet to know about it. The study has also revealed AJLAIS as one of the LIS standard journals in terms of its wider citation by contributors in the broader LIS literature.

The paper describes the prototype Associative Interactive Dictionary. (AID) system for search strategy formulation on a large operational free text on‐line bibliographic retrieval system. The primary design objective of the Associative Interactive Dictionary is the automatic generation and display of related terms, synonyms, broader and narrower terms and other semantic associations for given search concepts. The associative analysis procedures rely on statistical frequency distribution information about term occurrences in a set of document texts retrieved in response to a Boolean search query and the occurrence frequencies of the same terms in the entire data base. Over the past two decades, a number of small experimental retrieval systems have utilized term associations for automatic or semiautomatic document classification, indexing, thesaurus building or as a search aid. These experimental systems primarily employ term‐term and term‐document matrices for the computation of similarity measures between and among terms and documents. The matrix technique can not be implemented efficiently and cost effectively on large operational retrieval systems owing to problems of scale limitations. The major on‐line bibliographic search systems, such as ELHILL, ORBIT, DIALOG, RECON, BRS and others, do not provide any search aids other than the inherent browsing capability, term truncation and/or sequential string searching. In some files, manually constructed on‐line thesauri offer partial assistance to the user. The prototype AID system overcomes the problems of scale by utilizing a computationally efficient similarity measure and a highly compressed in‐core hash table of terms and term frequencies. The hash table can accommodate tens of thousands of free text search terms. Both an on‐line version and a batch version of the Associative Interactive Dictionary system are currently operational on TOXLINE, a large file of over 400,000 journal citations with abstracts on toxicology and the environment. TOXLINE is one of several on‐line data bases on the National Library of Medicine's ELHILL retrieval system. The overal design of the AID system is general in nature, and therefore it can be implemented on other large operational retrieval systems.

The development and application of a minicomputer based information retrieval system (CAIRS) is described. Capable of performing several different tasks this relatively low cost computer system is dedicated to this application and is operated entirely by the information and library staff. Specifically designed for information retrieval the system can perform fast interactive on‐line searches using a visual display. The general operation of the system, factors affecting its selection, and its effect on providing an efficient information service are considered

On‐line update combines a bibliography of recent on‐line articles with a search example from a data base producer showing techniques especially useful in searching its data base. In this issue, we have asked INSPEC to provide a bibliography of literature concerning on‐line retrieval. Only articles which have been added to their file since June 1976 are included. Here is their report.