During an evaluation of a digital interactive consumer health television channel (NHS Direct) on Kingston Interactive Television the prominence of the channel’s menus regarding the interactive element of its service diminished considerably over a period of four months. During this time the use...

To achieve its objective of having virtually all its services (central and local) online by 2005, the Government must close the “digital divide”, i.e. provide access for those sections of society not yet linked to the electronic, computer‐mediated communications environment. There is a...

Open source software development is becoming increasingly popular as a way of producing software, due to a number of factors. It is argued in this paper that these factors may have a significant impact on the future of information retrieval (IR) systems, and that it is desirable that these...

Introduces several new versions of PageRank (the link based Web page ranking algorithm), based on an information science perspective on the concept of the Web document. Although the Web page is the typical indivisible unit of information in search engine results and most Web information...

Reports the preliminary conclusions derived from the initial, pathfinder phase of a study devoted to a re‐assessment of the information needs of academic researchers. This exploration of researchers’ current information requirements and information seeking practices has been undertaken with...

The distinction between a meta‐ and an object‐language has become increasingly familiar in information science, through the diffusion of the concept of metadata. A significant antecedent to this distinction can be found in the development of formal logic. This paper proposes an analogous...

With the proliferation of new information channels such as the Web, e‐mail and wireless, it is becoming increasingly important to understand the impact of these technologies within information‐seeking and retrieval contexts. This issue of Aslib Proceedings presents research that begins to...

To clarify the subject of a project and indicate its limits, investigators must define for readers their work's key concepts. In most information behaviour research, definition of “information” itself is critical, although it may be difficult to do this immediately, as the researcher may be...

Purpose – Seeks to characterise world astronomy research during the last decade by an analysis of papers in the Science Citation Index identified with a special filter and to study Indian output in order to identify the leading institutions and authors. Design/methodology/approach – Lists of...

Purpose – The generation of inverted indexes is one of the most computationally intensive activities for information retrieval systems: indexing large multi‐gigabyte text databases can take many hours or even days to complete. We examine the generation of partitioned inverted files in order...