Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to study what extent readers’ socio-demographic characteristics, literary preferences and search behavior predict success in fiction search in library catalogs. Design/methodology/approach: In total, 80 readers searched for interesting novels in four...

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to elaborate the picture of situational relevance by examining how modes of music information are viewed as situationally relevant at different stages of information-seeking processes among music students. Design/methodology/approach: Empirical data of the...

This study explored how the expression of search facets and relevance feedback (RF) by users was related to search success in interactive and automatic query expansion in the course of the search process. Search success was measured both in the number of relevant documents retrieved, whether...

This study explores how experts and novices in pedagogics expanded queries supported by the ERIC thesaurus, and how this was connected to the search effectiveness in an easy and a difficult search task. The expert group consisted of 15 undergraduates in pedagogy and the novice group of 15...

Purpose – This paper sets out to examine the degree to which General Finnish Thesaurus (GFT) and FinMeSH cover various semantic expressions of medical concepts in patients' questions and physicians' answers concerning cardiovascular diseases. The former represents lay persons' information...

Purpose – The functional equivalence hypothesis suggests that a new communication medium will replace those activities that most closely perform the same functions for users as did the established media. There is scarce empirical evidence whether use of the internet displaces use of the public...

The aim of this article is threefold: (1) to give a summary of empirical results reported earlier on relations between students‘ problem stages in the course of writing their research proposals for a master’s thesis and the information sought, choice of search terms and tactics and relevance...

The objective of this study is to analyse how changes in relevance criteria are related to changes in problem stages during the task performance process. Relevance is understood as a task‐ and process‐oriented user construct. The assessment of relevance is based on both retrieved...