The literature of the evaluation of Internet search engines is reviewed. Although there have been many studies, there has been little consistency in the way such studies have been carried out. This problem is exacerbated by the fact that recall is virtually impossible to calculate in the fast...

Analysis of user viewing and query‐matching behavior furnishes additional evidence that the relevance of retrieved images for system users may arise from descriptions of objects and content‐based elements that are not evident or not even present in the image. This investigation looks at how...

This paper reports the results of a study funded by the Arts and Humanities Research Board which sought to investigate links between Web search strategies and retrieval effectiveness. A total of 68 students, enrolled on masters programmes in librarianship, information management and information...

The paper discusses the consistency of fiction indexing of library professionals and patrons based on an empirical test. Indexing was carried out with a Finnish fictional thesaurus and all of the test persons indexed the same five novels. The consistency of indexing was determined to be low;...

There has been much recent interest in extracting information from collections of Web links. One tool that has been used is Ingwersen’s Web impact factor. It has been demonstrated that several versions of this metric can produce results that correlate with research ratings of British...

The author reflects the conceptual and practical questions of network competence in the context of information seeking. Network competence is seen as one of the information‐related competences and is defined as the mastery of four major areas: knowledge of information resources available on...

The British government has promised a referendum on whether the United Kingdom should participate in the European single currency. There are questions about whether the UK population knows enough about economic and monetary union to make an informed decision and from what sources they received...

In this article an epistemological interpretation of the role of subject literature in scholarly communication shall be proposed. Such an interpretation will focus on the epistemological dimension of communicating knowledge through literature and how this is achieved through discursive and...

Much of the existing information seeking literature only considers information seeking when performed by an individual information seeker. This paper describes a study that explicitly considers information seeking from a collaborative perspective. The study used a grounded theory approach of a...

Many research‐based models of information seeking behaviour are limited in their ability to describe everyday life information seeking. Such models tend to focus on active information seeking, to the neglect of less‐directed practices. Models are often based on studies of scholars or...