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The purpose of this paper is to compare the online legal information sources available in law libraries in India.

Evaluation method followed with the help of specially designed checklist for e-resources in the field of law in India. The structured checklist was designed keeping in view of the objectives and e-resources/databases existing in Indian libraries, comprising 189 dichotomous questions and categorized into 12 broad categories.

The study revealed that the study legal information sources are lagging behind in exploiting the full potential of Web 2.0 features. No study legal information source has integrated Web 2.0 tools with contents and provision to contribute the contents by user any time, irrespective of location, except online legal information system (OLIS). Majority of e-resources are lacking search features, general features, Web 2.0 tools, better help features and provision to contribute contents by the users. Besides this, a mobile-based view is not available in majority of sources, and open access resources are lacking user-friendly features. Of the 16 legal information resources, only five have all the four citations search parameters. The study reveals that the OLIS has the maximum features and ranked “excellent”, followed by Manupatra ranked “average”. Half of study online legal information sources are ranked “needs improvement” and 37.5 per cent ranked “below average”.

The findings of the study will not only guide the law librarians to subscribe/renew legal databases in their libraries but also improve the legal information literacy among the users for effective use of online legal information sources. It is hoped that the evaluation of online legal information sources will enhance the user’s awareness and increase the use.

The findings of the study will not only guide the legal libraries to improve their online legal information sources, particularly, better help features and integrated content with Web 2.0 tools, but also provide guidelines for newly established legal libraries in India.

In recent years, there has been a proliferation of online resources that offer health information. However, there is no guarantee that all intended users will be able to use these resources effectively. This study seeks to investigate the types of help features that are available through existing internet‐based health information resources that support the use of these resources.

An investigation of 30 such resources was carried out with the objective of answering these questions. The paper intends to answer the following research questions: What types of help features are available in existing online health information resources? How can their formats and presentation styles be characterised based on existing interface design guidelines from the Human‐Computer Interaction (HCI) community? Were there any differences in the manner in which different internet‐based health information providers presented evidence‐based information?

The study discovered a range of help features being employed in these resources, ranging from step‐by‐step guides outlining the use of site features to the inclusion of links to resources that cater to user groups, who speak a language other than English. Further to this, the study also found that resources that were consumer‐based and commercially‐funded predominantly favoured the use of implicit help features to improve user access, whilst government‐funded libraries were more likely to make use of explicit help features to aid users in the use of specific features.

This study provides insightful information regarding current status and problems of the help features in existing online health information resources.

Most second‐generation online catalogs give libraries some capability to customize help messages, screen displays, and system prompts. Microcomputer applications designed or mounted locally may offer even more flexibility. Commercially available information systems offer the user some type of assistance, even when not totally profitable. The librarian has become an active, if not always willing, participant in the design of his or her system's user interface. Knowledge of both patrons and collections can have direct bearing on the structure and effectiveness of the library's automated system, its interface, and online help features.

The study aims to identify gender differences and similarities in the awareness of legal information resources and problems faced by legal professionals. Further, the study identifies the differences on the basis of gender, regarding the requirements in developing an online legal information system (OLIS) for the Indian environment.

The study was carried out in eight law libraries in Delhi using a structured questionnaire. Data were collected through the questionnaire having 27 questions including dichotomous (Yes/No), multiple-choice questions, rating and opinion questions. A need assessment survey was conducted using the structured questionnaire circulated among 750 respondents of eight institutions in Delhi. In total, 397 filled in questionnaires were received back. A total of 246 of the respondents were males and 151 females. The design and development of an OLIS went through five phases, i.e. preliminary preparation, designing and planning phase, development of OLIS covering preparation of software, data structures, metadata, search form, testing and implementation phase and maintenance.

The study found that 100 per cent of the female respondents were aware of online legal information resources. Maximum 28.4 per cent female respondents rated legal e-resources “very good”, whereas only 19.9 per cent male ranked them “very good”. Female respondents were found less aware about open access resources. In addition, of 246 male respondents, 213 (86.6 per cent) responded “Yes” about awareness of open access resources and 33 (13.4 per cent) marked “No”. In comparison, 116 (76.8 per cent) female respondents revealed they are aware of open access resources; 35 (23.2 per cent) were not aware of open access resources. Fifty-eight (23.6 per cent) male respondents were very dissatisfied, and 60 (24.4 per cent) completely dissatisfied. However, in contrast, 29 (19.2 per cent) female respondents were very dissatisfied and 24 (15.9 per cent) completely dissatisfied in using open access resources.

The study covers only eight institutions in Delhi, India. High courts and law universities in other parts of the country are not covered. In addition, OLIS contains a sample collection.

The study explores the inhibitions faced by female and male legal professionals. A suitable legal information system is developed to match the requirements of female legal professionals, research scholars and faculty members. The study is expected to address problems faced by female legal professionals in accessing the desired judicial and legislative information.

OLIS (www.olisindia.in) has been developed on the basis of a need assessment survey conducted on male and female legal professionals in India. No study has been conducted so far to compare the viewpoints of male and female legal professionals in India for developing an OLIS.

Online help and tutorials are an important part of library services, yet they are often studied in specific contexts and disciplines like subject-specific research guides. The objective of this study was to examine users’ common preferences and expectations of library help channels in general and online help in particular.

The authors conducted a qualitative survey with 45 library users. The survey asked users how they seek library help, their preferences and expectations of online help, content format and general help channels and later, a content analysis of survey responses was performed.

Results showed that survey participants have different prioritizations of library help channels. Half of the respondents preferred conceptual help that emphasizes concepts and underlying principles, while the other half preferred procedural (step-by-step) help or mixed. The survey also indicated reliance by participants on expert help, even when online help was available.

Based on the results, the authors identified users’ behavioral preferences, attitudes and expectations toward library help channels and online help content. They also discussed the unique challenge of creating online help for libraries, as users have a dynamic range of help-seeking preferences and mixed expectations of help content depending on the context.

The purpose of this paper is to explore legal information requirements of the legal community in India for a proposed online legal information system tailored to the Indian environment.

A needs assessment survey was conducted using a structured questionnaire circulated among 750 respondents from eight institutions in Delhi. A total of 397 filled-in questionnaires were personally collected by the investigator, showing a response rate of 52.9 per cent. All these questionnaires were selected for analysis and interpretation of data. Responses to 45 questions were analyzed and presented in the form of tables and figures using various statistical techniques.

The findings of the study show that majority of the respondents felt they faced a number of problems in using online legal resources such as accessibility of legal information in legal resources, lack of online help features, description of legal information sources, search screen too confusing and poor website design. In addition, respondents highlighted that access instructions on the online resources are not clear. Lack of expertise and insufficient knowledge of information and communication technology in using legal databases are also major hurdles. Majority of the respondents are somewhat satisfied in using open-access and commercial legal information resources and not aware of open-access resources in the field of law. Model online legal information system (OLIS) was designed and developed based on the findings drawn in the needs assessment survey to empower the common man with legal resources at no cost, and foster research in the field of law.

The model OLIS contains only a sample collection. It is expected that the proposed system will be implemented on a wider scale, so that lawyers, research scholars and common people can benefit.

The findings of the study will help libraries to subscribe to legal information resources and to design robust OLIS suitable in the Indian context. It is anticipated that the needs assessment survey of OLIS will help government agencies and law libraries to understand the problems of the legal fraternity in accessing legal information.

The present study designed a model OLIS for the Indian environment (www.olisindia.in) to aid the legal community in India, enabling them to save their valuable time. This system will help and foster interdisciplinary research learning and can be used as a tool for learning the basic concepts, as well as help deliberate on the emerging areas in the field of law.

The purpose of this paper is to evaluate Help features in digital libraries and identify problems related to their design.

This study selects six digital libraries to represent a variety of digital libraries developed or sponsored by different types of organisations. The Help features of these selected digital libraries are examined by their types (explicit versus implicit), formats (texts, images, screenshots, multimedia materials, and interactive formats), and presentation styles (descriptive, guided, procedural, and exemplary).

This study presents the types of Help features available in the selected digital libraries, and further characterises the formats and presentation styles of these Help features. In the process of analysis, the author also identifies six types of problems: lack of standards; tradeoff between using explicit Help and implicit help; tradeoff between using general Help versus specific Help; lack of interactive Help features; lack of dynamic presentation styles; and lack of Help features for advanced users and users who do not understand English.

In order to design Help features that facilitate users to effectively use digital libraries, further research needs to extend studies to what types of help‐seeking situations users generally encounter and the corresponding support they need.

This study provides insightful information regarding the current status and problems of the Help features in existing digital libraries.

This paper reports on a field‐based study of online help systems at the University of Maryland. After collecting data by means of interview, observation and focus group, analysis is grounded on the contextual data, thus shedding light on particular organizational and human behavioral issues on online help systems. The objectives of this research are to offer insights, enhance understandings, and provide a meaningful guide to design online help systems for educational institutions. Based on the contextual information and data analyses, several constructive thoughts are brought forward, along with the prototype system, for campus‐wide online help systems design. These implications include developing more time‐critical and task‐sensitive online help, merging CMC approaches, and customizing online help in terms of different user groups, even towards specialized online help systems. The limitations of this research are enunciated and future research as well.

The prevalence of online review websites and the ever-growing difficulty of judging review quality result in the increasing need for consumers to reduce cognitive costs. Thus, the purpose of this study is to find out the determinants of review helpfulness based on a comprehensive theoretical framework and empirical model.

This study applied a comprehensive framework, including both review content quality and reviewer background, to investigate the determinants of review helpfulness. It also presents empirical models to further control factors around product features.

Consumers are more likely to give helpful votes to those informative and readable reviews accompanied by extreme ratings. Reviewers who disclose information, have a high reputation and report a poor experience are always identified as helpful. Consumers also tend to signal suggestions from users with a local cultural background as subjective and useless.

This study focuses on upscale hotels in China. Information registered on TripAdvisor was used presenting a residential address not nationality. Only few controlling factors available because of the limited information are shown on online review websites.

Managers of both hotels and online review websites need to focus on reviews and/or reviewers as KOLs who attract consumers’ attention and affect their subsequent decisions. A dialogue with those KOLs can be by focusing on responding to reviews with certain characteristics. A reward system for reviews and KOLs may benefit review quality on online review websites and reduce cognition costs.

This positivistic research design, with multilevel approach, presenting a comprehensive conceptual framework and empirical model not only considering review- and reviewer-related factors but also controlled factors in product or service level (hotel-related characteristics).

It has always been a hot topic for online retailers to obtain consumers’ product evaluations from massive online reviews. In the process of online shopping, there is no face-to-face interaction between online retailers and customers. After collecting online reviews left by customers, online retailers are eager to acquire answers to some questions. For example, which product attributes will attract consumers? Or which step brings a better experience to consumers during the process of shopping? This paper aims to associate the latent Dirichlet allocation (LDA) model with the consumers’ attitude and provides a method to calculate the numerical measure of consumers’ product evaluation expressed in each word.

First, all possible pairs of reviews are organized as a document to build the corpus. After that, latent topics of the traditional LDA model noted as the standard LDA model, are separated into shared and differential topics. Then, the authors associate the model with consumers’ attitudes toward each review which is distinguished as positive review and non-positive review. The product evaluation reflected in consumers’ binary attitude is expanded to each word that appeared in the corpus. Finally, a variational optimization is introduced to calculate parameters mentioned in the expanded LDA model.

The experiment’s result illustrates that the LDA model in the research noted as an expanded LDA model, can successfully assign sufficient probability with words related to products attributes or consumers’ product evaluation. Compared with the standard LDA model, the expanded model intended to assign higher probability with words, which have a higher ranking within each topic. Besides, the expanded model also has higher precision on the prediction set, which shows that breaking down the topics into two categories fits better on the data set than the standard LDA model. The product evaluation of each word is calculated by the expanded model and depicted at the end of the experiment.

This research provides a new method to calculate consumers’ product evaluation from reviews in the level of words. Words may be used to describe product attributes or consumers’ experiences in reviews. Assigning words with numerical measures can analyze consumers’ products evaluation quantitatively. Besides, words are labeled themselves, they can also be ranked if a numerical measure is given. Online retailers can benefit from the result for label choosing, advertising or product recommendation.