An evaluation of passage-level indexing strategies for a technical report archive by Michael Williams LIBRES Volume 8, Issue 1 (March 1998)
Past research has shown that using evidence from document passages rather than complete documents is an effective way of improving the precision of full-text database searches. However, passage-level indexing has yet to be widely adopted for commercial or online databases.
This paper reports on experiments designed to test the efficacy of passage-level indexing with a particular collection of a full-text online database, the New Zealand Digital Library. Discourse passages and word-window passages are used for the indexing process. Both ranked and Boolean searching are used to test the resulting indexes.
Overlapping window passages are shown to offer the best retrieval performance with both ranked and Boolean queries. Modifications may be necessary to the term weighting methodology in order to ensure optimal ranked query performance.
The Internet’s effect on libraries: some personal observations by Ya-ning Chen LIBRES Volume 8, Issue 1 (March 1998)
A library’s collection development is a continuous process and responds to the needs and goals of its users. It includes not just the policy of collection development itself but also the procedures of selection, acquisition and evaluation. With the use of the Internet and the advent of the virtual library, the new direction in collection development has become a number one issue. This article considers future directions for collection development from four standpoints: changes under the virtual library environment; the means of acquisition; related problems; and future directions.
