Volume 14, Issue 2

Background
From the perspective of all of human history, a twenty-year period— one score —is a brief moment. In the immediate context of our harried electronic age, however, twenty years are enough for three or four technological lifetimes. Indeed, the twenty years from 1983 to 2003 were witness to profound and rapid change that altered the very heart of the library profession, “the process of acquiring, storing, and accessing information” (Kwasik, 2002, p. 33). Prominent sociologist Manuel Castells (2000), arguing that the last quarter century ushered in a most fundamental social transformation, identified “new information technologies” (p. 693) as a key contributing factor…

Digital libraries and the Web have brought enormously powerful search mechanisms to the desktops of many researchers. With the use of insights from cultural studies and the history and philosophy of science, it is argued that one likely outcome is a change in the acceptable standards for literature reviews, leading to changes in article contents to reflect a broader academic basis. As a result, researchers should be trained to read and evaluate material from a much wider range of subjects than previously necessary. The broadening base may impact science and non-science subjects differently.

This paper examines the suitability of word association tests to generate user-derived descriptors, descriptor hierarchies, and categories of inter-term relationships. The typical assumption underlying these word association tests is that the response terms function either as synonyms or antonyms, an assumption that restricts unnecessarily the potential value of such tests. Rather than assuming how people inter-relate two terms, it may be more useful to ask participants to explain why they think these two terms are related. In this study, thirty library and information science practitioners were asked to provide as many response words as they could for fifteen stimulus terms and to describe how the response and stimulus terms were inter-related. The word association test was successful in generating a set of user-derived descriptors . Participants identified twenty types of inter-term relationships, the most commonly-cited of which are type, part, synonym, activity, and tool. That the participants identified a total of twenty types of relationships suggests also that word association tests can serve as a valuable tool in examining the different ways users group terms and the types of inter-term relationships that end users most commonly associate with any given concept and its response terms.

The National Library of Medicine produces websites for the general public that are supposed to meet official standards of scientific rigor. These sites exist in the context of the World Wide Web, where anyone is able to make claims about medical science and recommend treatment. Medical sites that are sponsored or endorsed by the government are not especially prominent online. For those who trust the medical profession, the failure of the official sites to draw the lion’s share of public attention is a problem, and government medical sites should be more aggressively promoted. However, the official sites have provoked controversy and criticism. Those who are skeptical of the “medical establishment” may welcome the pluralism and diversity of views available on the Internet; they may oppose efforts to channel viewers to official sites. This paper argues in favor of the government-sponsored sites, but with some caveats.