Describes the components and procedures involved in implementing St. John's University's (New York) document delivery system, which uses University Microfilm International's PowerPackages product in conjunction with the Multi-Project for Automated Library System used by Westchester Academic Libraries Director's Organization. Evaluates the impact…

Provides a succinct guide to building a home page. Overview includes the main Hypertext Mark-up Language (HTML) tags, plus examples of their use; forms and clickable maps; new HTML 3.0 tags; and pointers to sites that contain HTML editors, graphics, backgrounds, and music. Five figures illustrate the text. (JKP)

Reviews ConSearch 3.0, a product that provides flexible searching of electronic files, allowing the location of related meanings as well as exact matches. ConSearch 3.0 differs from other file retrieval approaches by relating words in search phrases of questions to the "meaning" of the words, which are stored in a "conceptual database," or lexicon…

Examines the issue of diversity and cable television from a content analysis of 1,035 randomly chosen moments from four channels: network, cable, independent, and public. Results demonstrate that there has been little movement towards more accurate proportional representation of historically underrepresented demographic groups across the 32…

Assesses aggressive behavior on television in terms of its realism. Replicated and contextualized reality were assessed for 100.5 hours of programming. Replicated reality compared television portrayals to real world characteristics, and was similar in seriousness to aggression and gender patterns of perpetrators and victims. Contextual reality…

Focuses on the ambiguities in the fluid human-telemedia infrastructure. Suggests the need for new signposts to guide our understanding of this environment and the changes it will bring to social roles. (Author)

Describes and evaluates three different videoconferencing systems for supporting multiparty remote conversations. The systems differed by the number of participants visible at once, their spatial arrangement, and control over who was seen. These conversations were compared to same-room and audio-only conversations. Only the same-room condition…

Offers a framework for explicitly defining the types of information that clinicians use and the various states of information need on which different studies have focused. Highlights include methodological issues in information needs research, clinical questions, and evaluating information systems and the impact on information needs. (Author/LRW)

Discussion of evidence-based medicine (EBM) focuses on information tools to facilitate the practice of EBM that were developed, evaluated, and made more accessible by the McMaster University (Canada) Faculty of Health Sciences. Highlights include users' guides to medical literature, strategies for improving MEDLINE searches, new journals, and…

Describes the SAPHIRE (Semantic and Probabilistic Heuristic Information Retrieval Environment) that was developed to identify optimal approaches to indexing, retrieval, and evaluation of information retrieval systems in the biomedical domain. Six evaluation studies that have been done with SAPHIRE are summarized and future challenges are…

Describes types of full-text databases in medicine; discusses features for searching full-text journal databases available through online vendors; reviews research on full-text databases in medicine; and describes the MEDLINE/Full-Text Research Project at the University of Missouri (Columbia) which investigated precision, recall, and relevancy.…

Describes the National Library of Medicine's (NLM) experimental Sourcerer project which is developing software to accept a user query, automatically identifying appropriate information resources, and facilitating connection to those sources for information retrieval. Discusses the use of the World Wide Web and the Unified Medical Language System.…

Discusses limitations in the development of health care information systems; explains component methodology for complex software development, including component interface semantics; and describes Arachne, a development environment available via the Internet consisting of a set of tools that enables applications to be constructed through…

Describes the state of electronic medical records, their advantage over existing paper records, the problems impeding their implementation, and concerns over their security and confidentiality. Topics include challenges for the new health care era, including managed care systems, cost benefits, lack of standards, and future possibilities.…

Reviews the controlled medical vocabularies available today and some of the reasons why they have failed to meet the needs of application developers. Topics include standard vocabularies, including International Classification of Diseases and Medical Subject Headings; uses of vocabularies in medical computing; current research; and remaining…