The established areas of online activity: finance, science, and now law, are characterised by the high value which they attach to information and their ability to pay for it. Outwardly this would seem to be true for the media and we would be rather surprised at their omission from this list....

In spite of ostensibly favourable conditions, end‐user searching of online text information retrieval systems among City firms is relatively uncommon. Online searching is flourishing but is very much the province of librarians. Textline is the exception, being used fairly extensively by...

BLAISE‐LINE provides online access to all of the British Library's major catalogues. It provides access to other major bibliographies as well, notably those of the Library of Congress and Whitaker (British Books in Print). Altogether it boasts 21 files, all of a bibliographic nature, and some...

The Internet is now with us and as a result fundamental changes in information work encompassing the ‘virtual library’ and the ‘cybrarian’ are being forecasted. But how much of all this is hype — and have we not all been here before, when online in the shape of full‐text systems like...

Public access to European Union information has become an issue in European Union information policy. The Public Information Relay has been established in the United Kingdom in order to facilitate access to European Union information for the general public. This research project aimed to assess...

The information needs of consumers or the general public have been neglected by information researchers. Consumers are the users of public libraries, they are changing their sources of information and they are a very large group. This paper discusses two investigations into the information needs...

A structure for analysing information needs is outlined. The purpose of the structure is to enable data on users to be collected in a systematic and routine manner. The form of analysis is demonstrated through a consideration of the information needs of newspaper journalists — a group for...

Published research indicates that teachers have not integrated information technology into their classroom practice and that computer use tends to be peripheral to other curriculum activities. However almost all of this research is based on survey methods involving self‐assessment and...

The Internet looks set to have a major influence on information seeking behavior, although there is very little hard data around as to what these changes will be or where they will occur. This British Library funded study set out to gather such data from the media using open‐ended interview...

The Northern Echo has long provided its newspaper in a digital form. It is now looking to use the Internet to widen its customer base and information remit. To this end two initiatives have been launched: it now provides background information to support and enhance the stories it publishes and...