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The objective of this study is to analyse how changes in relevance criteria are related to changes in problem stages during the task performance process. Relevance is understood as a task‐ and process‐oriented user construct. The assessment of relevance is based on both retrieved bibliographical information and the documents acquired and read on the basis of this information. The participants of the study were eleven students who attended a course for one term for preparing a research proposal for the master’s thesis. The students were asked to make an IR search at the beginning, middle and end of the course. Data for describing their understanding of the work task, search goals and tactics as well as relevance assessments were collected during the search sessions. Pre‐ and post‐search interviews were conducted during each session. The students were asked to think aloud during the search session. The transaction logs were captured and the thinking aloud was recorded. Research and search diaries were also collected. The findings support to a certain extent the overall hypotheses that a person’s problem stage during task performance is related to his or her use of relevance criteria in assessing retrieved references and documents. There is a connection between an individual’s changing understanding of his or her task and how the relevance of references and full texts is judged. The more structured the task in the process, the more able the person is to distinguish between relevant and other sources. The relevance criteria of documents changed more than the criteria of references during the process. Moreover, it seems that understanding of topicality varies depending on the phase of the process.

Full text of a document is a rich source of information that can be used to provide meaningful topics. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how to use citation context (CC) in the full text to identify the cited topics and citing topics efficiently and effectively by employing automatic text analysis algorithms.

The authors present two novel topic models, Citation-Context-LDA (CC-LDA) and Citation-Context-Reference-LDA (CCRef-LDA). CC is leveraged to extract the citing text from the full text, which makes it possible to discover topics with accuracy. CC-LDA incorporates CC, citing text, and their latent relationship, while CCRef-LDA incorporates CC, citing text, their latent relationship and reference information in CC. Collapsed Gibbs sampling is used to achieve an approximate estimation. The capacity of CC-LDA to simultaneously learn cited topics and citing topics together with their links is investigated. Moreover, a topic influence measure method based on CC-LDA is proposed and applied to create links between the two-level topics. In addition, the capacity of CCRef-LDA to discover topic influential references is also investigated.

The results indicate CC-LDA and CCRef-LDA achieve improved or comparable performance in terms of both perplexity and symmetric Kullback–Leibler (sKL) divergence. Moreover, CC-LDA is effective in discovering the cited topics and citing topics with topic influence, and CCRef-LDA is able to find the cited topic influential references.

The automatic method provides novel knowledge for cited topics and citing topics discovery. Topic influence learnt by our model can link two-level topics and create a semantic topic network. The method can also use topic specificity as a feature to rank references.

The nature and relative merits of two measures of information retrieval system effectiveness, documents read and relevant references retrieved, are discussed. Using data on 2,380 searches completed at London University's Central Information Service, the author presents a mathematical model for the relationship between these two variables. Data suggest that this is best modelled by a monotonically asymptotic function, i.e. by a function increasing to a limit. A negative exponential function provides the best fit to the data, though a simpler hyperbolic function also provides a good fit. The suggested relationship between documents read and relevant references retrieved is further confirmed when the data is analysed by subject area of the user group. The major distinction between groups was the limiting value for mean number of documents read. Medical scientists read considerably more than the average, while engineers read considerably less. Biological, physical and social scientists were indistinguishable from the population as a whole within the statistical limitations of the data. Potential areas for further research are suggested.

The purpose of this paper is to help reference librarians in academic institutions to more effectively use UN information resources to meet users' needs.

This paper outlines the United Nations' structure, addresses the effects of misconceptions regarding the organization's boundaries, describes the categories of UN information resources and their most useful content, identifies and evaluates the most important reference tools by or about the UN, and casts light on little‐known obstacles to intellectual access in the UN information environment.

Access to UN information is often hindered by the idiosyncrasies of UN documents and their records, misconceptions about the United Nations' relationships with other organizations, and a lack of in‐depth information about UN reference sources. The effects of these problems can be ameliorated, however, through the information, techniques, and strategies presented here.

This article identifies and evaluates the UN reference sources of greatest use to general reference librarians. This is the first publication to demonstrate how indexing policies and common characteristics of UN documents impede access to UN information and to show how these barriers can be circumvented.

An urgent topic of conversation among government documents librarians today is the need for training, in both the use of federal depository collections and the provision of reference services for these collections. Two trends that have pushed this issue to the forefront in recent years are the proliferation of electronic resources and the fact that, in many institutions, government documents reference services are being integrated into general reference service points. This selective bibliography focuses on recent articles that present a substantially detailed account of training and educational programs for everything from ongoing professional development training for staff to course‐integrated instruction for students, and will serve as a resource for librarians involved in these educational efforts.

The present study aims to investigate how textual features, depth of citation treatment, reasons for citation, and relationships between citers and citees predict author‐rated citation importance.

A total of 49 biology and 50 psychology authors assessed the importance, reason for citation, and relationship to the cited author for each cited reference in his or her own recently published empirical article. Participants performed their evaluations on individualized web‐based surveys.

The paper finds that certain textual features, such as citation frequency, citation length, and citation location, as well as author‐stated reasons for citation predicted ratings of importance, but the strength of the relationship often depended on citation features in the article as a whole. The relationship between objective citation features and author‐rated importance also tended to be weaker for self‐citations.

The study sample included authors of relatively long empirical articles with a minimum of 35 cited references. There were relatively few disciplinary differences, which suggests that citation behavior in psychology may be similar to that in natural science disciplines. Future studies should involve authors from other disciplines employing diverse referencing patterns in articles of varying lengths and types.

Findings of the study have enabled a comprehensive, profound level of understanding of citation behaviors of biology and psychology authors. It uncovered a number of unique characteristics in authors' citation evaluations, such as article‐level context effects and rule‐ versus affective‐based judgments. The paper suggests possible implications for developing retrieval algorithms based on automatically predicted importance of cited references.

Effectively accessing government documents is often a challenge for frontline reference staff working in a merged public service environment. The purpose of this paper is to build a case for establishing sustainable information literacy that incorporates government publications information into research and reference services.

The paper describes the reasons for, and challenges of, incorporating government documents training for reference staff, and suggests suitable strategies and techniques.

Keeping up with knowledge in related fields other than a chosen specialty is a challenge facing librarians today, but knowing how to find print and online government resources is critical for reference desk staff to help meet the information needs of the public. A variety of techniques and strategies may be employed to help mine these important resources. Web 2.0 tools and internet‐based tutorials on government publications may be used to facilitate training.

Staff are encouraged to develop collaborative training relationships to motivate, teach, facilitate, and equip others for self‐sufficiency and competency.

The paper shows how reference staff knowledge of government publications can be enhanced through training with both traditional and new technologies. Training can be accomplished through self‐motivation and partnering and need not be always formal.

The aim of this paper is to offer a platform for thinking about the reference interaction experience by borrowing from museum studies literature, particularly from a holistic understanding of the museum visitor’s experience.

The goal of this paper is to offer a platform for thinking about the reference interaction experience by borrowing from museum studies literature, particularly from a holistic understanding of the museum visitor’s experience.

Object knowledge framework-reference (OKF-Ref) enables reference staff to connect patrons with resources to enable deeper thinking and research.

OKF-Ref seeks to permit reference transactions as experiences rooted in synchronous individual, group and material potential connections made between resources and information seekers.

New considerations in lived reference experience encourages reference librarians to think about the whole experience of reference interactions, allowing intermediaries to be proactive toward the goal of unified experiences for patrons.

Even if there is a wealth of research highlighting the key role of values and cultural significance for heritage management and, defining specific interventions on built heritage, seldom the relation to their leading values and values hierarchy have been researched. How do values and interventions relate? What values trigger most and least interventions on heritage? How do these values relate and characterize interventions? And what are the values hierarchy that make the interventions on built heritage differ?

This paper conducts a systematic content analysis of 69 international doctrinal documents – mainly adopted by Council of Europe, UNESCO, and ICOMOS, during 1877 and 2021. The main aim is to reveal and compare the intervention concepts and their definitions, in relation to values. The intensity of the relationship between intervention concepts and values is determined based on the frequency of mentioned values per intervention.

There were three key findings. First, historic, social, and aesthetical values were the most referenced values in international doctrinal documents. Second, while intervention concepts revealed similar definitions and shared common leading values, their secondary values and values hierarchy, e.g. aesthetical or social values, are the ones influencing the variation on their definitions. Third, certain values show contradictory roles in the same intervention concepts from different documents, e.g. political and age values.

This paper explores a novel comparison between different interventions concepts and definitions, and the role of values. The results can contribute to support further research and practice on clarifying the identified differences.

A simple notation for describing the internal structure of a document is presented, and contrasted with other, more conventional notations for describing documents, in particular those related to subject‐classification systems and document description for bibliographic purposes, as well as with document metalanguage codes such as those of SGML. It is suggested such a notation should assist the science of human messaging through (1) permitting hypotheses to be more readily expressed and/or tested concerning document structure, and (2) facilitating the formation of taxonomies of documents based on their structures. Such a notation should also be of practical value in contributing to the processes of document specification, building and testing, and possibly also contribute to new generations of IR systems which link retrieval against record databases to the search systems internal to specific documents. It is suggested that, following formative criticism, professional standards for describing document structure should be sought based on the notation. The notation is at present limited to linear documents, but extensions to it to accommodate documents in non‐linear form (e.g. hypertext documents) and/or existing in physically distributed form, could usefully be constructed. Examples of the application of the notation are provided.