Search results

INSTRUCT is a multi‐user, text retrieval system which was developed as an interactive teaching package for demonstrating modern information retrieval techniques, these including natural language query processing, best match searching and automatic relevance feedback based on probabilistic term weighting. INSTRUCT has recently been extended and now additionally has facilities for query expansion using both relevance and term co‐occurrence data, for cluster‐based searching and for two browsing search strategies. These retrieval mechanisms are used to search a file of 26,280 titles and abstracts from the Library and Information Science Abstracts database; both menu‐based and command‐based searching are allowed.

The Library Electronic Text Resource Service (LETRS) at Indiana University began in 1992. LETRS combines a facility with an online service. Staff have tried many different ways to raise awareness of an build support for both parts of LETRS, with varying degrees of success. The most successful publicity efforts were based on an understanding of how humanists conduct research.

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 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.

The amount of library material available online is staggering, but still at very early stages in terms of discovery tools. Without a centralized source to search digitized collections from these projects, it is important to understand their goals and distinctions between the services they provide. This paper aims to describe the complex landscape of mass digitization projects and their impact on interlending and document supply.

The paper analyzes the history, goals and achievements of the mass digitization projects. It also looks at the sites that aggregate digitized materials from these projects and their interfaces for providing access.

The number of library collections now digitized has reached numbers unimaginable even just a few years ago. The impact on interlending and document supply will likely be limited in the near term, since much of interlibrary borrowing is for materials published in the past decade, and much of the digitized content from this period is restricted in Google Book Search, the only mass digitization project to undertake digital conversion of copyrighted material. End users will be able to discover materials of interest in new ways, but are likely to need or want to see the print source for recent publications.

Library staff members need to understand these projects and how they differ from one another in order to provide optimal service to their readers.

The paper is a guide to negotiating the landscape of mass digitization, with an overview of the projects and their goals and accomplishments, with analysis of the impact on interlending and document supply.

The ICL Distributed Array Processor, or DAP, is a single instruction stream, multiple data stream computer in which instructions are broadcast for simultaneous execution in each of 4096 processing elements. Although originally developed for numeric computation, the DAP also provides a means for the rapid matching of the term lists representing documents and queries in information retrieval systems, and this paper presents an investigation of the use of the DAP for the parallel searching of large serial files of documents. Best match retrieval experiments with three collections of documents and queries show that the DAP is very much more efficient than a conventional mainframe computer in calculating a measure of similarity between a query and each of the documents in a large collection. It is suggested that the DAP, or machines with similar architectures, could form the basis for interactive bibliographic searching of serial files.

This paper aims to provide an overview and update of what one actually knows about the impact of open access on inter-lending and document supply.

A review of recent papers, published after the Berlin Declaration on Open Access in 2003.

Everything seems to oppose document supply and open access. Open access has contributed to the recent decline of interlibrary loan (ILL) and document supply requests but is not the only reason and probably not the most important. Open repositories and open-access journals have the potential to substitute ILL and document supply; yet for different reasons, including legal compliance, this substitution remains of limited interest. ILL and document supply institutions have started to integrate open access into their workflow and service provision in different ways, and the paper provides a conceptual framework with some perspectives for further service development.

Paradoxically, relatively few papers make the link between open access and document supply, with empirical and/or conceptual elements. This paper proposes a synthesis and opens perspectives for future development and research.