An empirical investigation of the consistency of retrieval through Internet search engines is reported. Thirteen engines are evaluated: AltaVista, EuroFerret, Excite, HotBot, InfoSeek, Lycos, MSN, NorthernLight, Snap, WebCrawler and three national Dutch engines: Ilse, Search.nl and Vindex. The...

This paper is a discussion document, drawing on the experiences of the Okapi team as reported elsewhere in this issue. It is intended to raise some of the issues that are currently exercising the information retrieval research community, in the context of experimentation and evaluation.

This paper investigates the problem of the labelling of the library, documentation and information field with particular emphasis on the terms ‘information’ and ‘document’. What influences introduced the concept of ‘information’ into the library field in the middle of the twentieth...

This study explores the in‐house use age distribution of journals in the library of Veterans General Hospital, Taipei, Taiwan, their citation age distribution and the difference between them. The use study employed the sweep method and the study period lasted for six months. The citation age...

Purpose – ASLIB – the Association of Special Libraries and Information Bureaux – was founded in 1924 with the aim of co‐ordinating the activities of specialist information services in the UK. This article seeks to present a new history of the first quarter‐century of the Association....

Purpose – As part of a series to mark the 60th anniversary of the Journal of Documentation , the aim is to review a 1956 article by Barbara Kyle. Design/methodology/approach – Literature review and analysis. Findings – The theme of Barbara Kyle's 1956 Journal of Documentation article...