Journal of the American Society for Information Science (JASIS) -- Table of Contents

Contributed by
Richard Hill
American Society for Information Science
Silver Spring, Maryland, USA
rhill@asis.org

VOLUME 50, NUMBER 5 (May 1999)

CONTENTS

  • Editorial

  • In This Issue
    Bert R. Boyce

  • Research

    Increasing Link Marker Effectiveness for WWW and other Hypermedia Interfaces: An Examination of End-User Preferences
    John R. Carlson and Charles J. Kacmar

    How do hypermedia users rate the effectiveness of link marker design?

    Using various text node forms, and a graphic node, Carlson and Kacmar apply seven different marker designs. An instrument for each node was used to evaluate the reactions of 122 undergraduate students. All groups expressed a clear preference for link designation by color and generally for graphic bounded markers over character set markers or unbounded graphics, like bullets. The design of the link marker seems to be of more importance to novice searchers than to those more expert.

    The Role of Experience in the Information Search Process of an Early Career Information Worker: Perceptions of Uncertainty, Complexity, Construction, and Sources
    Carol Collier Kuhlthau

    Kuhlthau carries out a case study over a 5-year period of a security analyst's perception of information seeking processes. Novice efforts involved preparing a correct story for each client that fit that the person's style and information needs. As an expert, the role is seen as adding value to the client's knowledge base even if it involves pointing out the story is wrong. Both internal and external sources were used extensively at both stages, but internal sources less as an expert where clients were also information sources. A mediator was not viewed as important, and indeed a possible role was considered to be the training of analysts in the research process.

    A Parallel Relational Database Management System Approach to Relevance Feedback in Information Retrievel
    Carol Lundquist, Ophir Frieder, David O. Holmes, and David Grossman

    Using a relational structure, parallel processing, and standard SQL, Lundquist et al. calculate similarity coefficients between documents and queries and isolate the highly similar documents. SQL is then used to extract the terms from the isolated documents, and to rank these terms to select terms for feedback. SQL statements then create new queries and allow for varying new term weights relative to the initial terms. Using TREC queries and TIPSTER data, the collection weight times the number of isolated documents provided the best improvement in measures. The best number of documents for feedback term selection was between five and twenty, and the best number of terms from a list so generated between ten and twenty.

    The parallel processors and disk I/O imbalance remained below 10% during computation, indicating that additional processors would reduce response time. Parallel efficiency, however, falls with a large number of processors since words are more likely to start with some letters than others and data is unevenly distributed. Balanced data storage results in better CPU times than would be predicted by processor increases.

    Hypersonic and Supersonic Flow Roadmaps Using Bibliometrics and Database Tomography
    R. N. Kostoff, Henry J. Eberhart, and Darrell Ray Toothman

    In a somewhat larger bibliometric study Kostoff, Eberhart, and Toothman use what they term Database Tomography (DT), a technique which extracts phrases from text, counting their frequency of occurrence and measuring their proximity to one another. Experts then select themes from the high-frequency phrases. Science Citation Index and Compendex were searched for the terms "hypersonic" and "supersonic," and the results divided into relevant and nonrelevant sets. High-frequency phrases from the relevant set were ORed to the query and those from the nonrelevant set were combined using an AND NOT operation. Papers (1,284 in all) were retrieved with an average 2.63 authors per paper. Authors, journals, institutions, and countries concentrate in a few high contributors. Few papers were highly cited, and these tended to be recent.

    An Analysis of Orientedness in Cataloging Rules
    Shoichi Taniguchi

    By "orientedness," Taniguchi means an inclination of a cataloging rule toward a certain objective or function of bibliographic description. A code should state objectives, principles based upon these objectives, and rules oriented toward the objectives. Objectives are associated with orientedness toward identity, contents, bibliographic relationships, access conditions, provenance, consistency, and cost-effectiveness. Analysis of a code's principles and rules in this light will show that a consistent weight application to orientedness would result in changes to AARC2, and that different weight applications would lead to different rule sets.

    Information Society or Cash Nexus? A Study of the United States as a Copyright Haven
    Julian Warner

    During the 100 years after 1791 when the U.S. did not grant copyright to foreign citizens economic and political developments are seen by Warner to precede and influence information developments. Spatial expansion and economic development created a growing economic market in the U.S.A., a high literacy rate, and a demand for reading material. After the late 1870s, the closing of the frontier and declining growth rates led to a higher dependence on exports and increasing interest in conforming with other foreign trade policies. Early U.S. copyright policy is compared to current policies in the Republic of China.

  • Brief Communication

    Do Deans Publish What They Preach?
    Blaise Cronin and Holly Crawford

    In this issue's brief communication, Cronin and Crawford report on a search of the sitting library and information science school deans or directors of the top 20 programs in the 1996 Gorman Report using the Social Science Citation Index to determine citation level to their publications from January 1981 to December 1997. Sixteen are in the 0-99 range. There appears to be no relationship between a school's ranking and its administrator's record of scholarship.

  • Book Reviews

    The DDC, the Universe of Knowledge, and the Post-Modern Library, by Francis L. Miksa
    Reviewed by Birger Hj\orland

    Basic Research Methods for Librarians, by Ronald R. Powell
    Reviewed by William T. Fischer

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