Search

Digital library users have to deal with many separate services. This paper describes efforts in the United Kingdom to use OpenURL technology to provide `joined-up' services. The focus is on zetoc, a national electronic service, which enables users to find references in a British Library bibliographic database. zetoc now uses OpenURL technology to provide routes to services, which might give users access to electronic full text versions of references they have found. Data is provided from two questionnaire surveys and an interview programme conducted to explore user responses to these services. These evaluation studies show that users want these integrated services and are extremely positive about them when they work. However, `joined-up' services depend for their success on the access rights that each user has to full text sources in their institution. As a result, the success level in obtaining full text varies considerably between institutions. Users in disadvantageous positions have expressed disappointment and frustration; the service may be regarded as a promise not fulfilled. The paper describes the development of `joined-up services' as a partnership at national and local levels.

The Notable annotation system enables users to annotate paper documents using handheld devices in a mobile environment. This paper describes the design issues and solutions that arose in creating Notable, with a particular focus on design challenges at the intersection of annotations and handheld technology. Novel design strategies include separating the annotation writing platform from the document viewing platform, providing search as the method for document selection, offering context-sensitive phrase completion and icon-based graphical pinning for fine-granularity annotation anchoring, and including some support for coordinating group annotation activity.

We consider search engines and collaborative tagging systems from the perspective of resource discovery and re-finding on the Web. We performed repeated searches over nine months on Google and del.icio.us for web pages related to three topics selected to have different dynamic characteristics. The results show differences in the resources they provide to the searcher. The resources tagged on del.icio.us differ strongly from the top results returned by Google. The results also suggest the changes in the most recently tagged web pages may be associated with the level of activity in user communities and, indirectly, with external events.

This is an investigation of information retrieval performance of Turkish search engines with respect to precision, normalized recall, coverage and novelty ratios. We defined seventeen query topics for Arabul, Arama, Netbul and Superonline. These queries were carefully selected to assess the capability of a search engine for handling broad or narrow topic subjects, exclusion of particular information, identifying and indexing Turkish characters, retrieval of hub/authoritative pages, stemming of Turkish words, correct interpretation of Boolean operators. We classified each document in a retrieval output as being ”relevant” or ”nonrelevant” to calculate precision and normalized recall ratios at various cut-off points for each pair of query topic and search engine. We found the coverage and novelty ratios for each search engine.We also tested how search engines handle meta-tags and dead links. Arama appears to be the best Turkish search engine in terms of average precision and normalized recall ratios, and the coverage of Turkish sites. Turkish characters (and stemming as well) still cause bottlenecks for Turkish search engines. Superonline and Netbul make use of the indexing information in metatag fields to improve retrieval results.