Searching in a Book

Information has no value unless it is accessible. With physical books, most people rely on the table of contents and subject index to find what they want. But what if they are reading a book in a digital library and have access to a full-text search tool?. The paper describes a search interface to Realistic Books, and investigates the influence of document format and search result presentation on information finding. We compare searching in Realistic Books with searching in HTML and PDF files, and with physical books

Logological Poetry: An Editorial

It was Dmitri Borgmann who put the word logology into circulation. Before Language on Vacation, his first book, was published, he wrote to me: I don\u27t believe the word \u27logology\u27 has ever appeared in a book devoted to words or puzzles. I dug it out of the unabridged Oxford while searching for a suitable name for my activity

Using a task-based approach in evaluating the usability of BoBIs in an e-book environment

This paper reports on a usability evaluation of BoBIs (Back-of-the-book Indexes) as searching and browsing tools in an e-book environment. This study employed a task-based approach and within-subject design. The retrieval performance of a BoBI was compared with a ToC and Full-Text Search tool in terms of their respective effectiveness and efficiency for finding information in e-books. The results demonstrated that a BoBI was significantly more efficient (faster) and useful compared to a ToC or Full-Text Search tool for finding information in an e-book environment

Consumer Search on the Internet

This paper uses consumer search data to explain search frictions in online markets, within the context of an equilibrium search model. I use a novel dataset of consumer online browsing and purchasing behavior, which tracks all consumer search prior to each transaction. Using observed search intensities from the online book industry, I estimate search cost distributions that allow for asymmetric consumer sampling. Research on consumer search often assumes a symmetric sampling rule for analytical convenience despite its lack of realism. Search behavior in the online book industry is quite limited: in only 25 percen of the transactions did consumers visit more than one bookstore's website. The industry is characterized by a strong consumer preference for certain retailers. Accounting for unequal consumer sampling halves the search cost estimates from 1.8 to 0.9 dollars per search in the online book industry. Analysis of time spent online suggests substitution between the time consumers spend searching and the relative opportunity cost of their time. Retired people, those with lower education levels, and minorities (with the exception of Hispanics) spent significantly more time searching for a book online. There is a negative relationship between income levels and time spent searching.consumer search, internet, search costs

Visualization of database structures for information retrieval

This paper describes the Book House system, which is designed to support children's information retrieval in libraries as part of their education. It is a shareware program available on CD‐ROM or floppy disks, and comprises functionality for database searching as well as for classifying and storing book information in the database. The system concept is based on an understanding of children's domain structures and their capabilities for categorization of information needs in connection with their activities in schools, in school libraries or in public libraries. These structures are visualized in the interface by using metaphors and multimedia technology. Through the use of text, images and animation, the Book House encourages children ‐ even at a very early age ‐ to learn by doing in an enjoyable way, which plays on their previous experiences with computer games. Both words and pictures can be used for searching; this makes the system suitable for all age groups. Even children who have not yet learned to read properly can, by selecting pictures, search for and find those books they would like to have read aloud. Thus, at the very beginning of their school life, they can learn to search for books on their own. For the library community, such a system will provide an extended service which will increase the number of children's own searches and also improve the relevance, quality and utilization of the book collections in the libraries. A market research report on the need for an annual indexing service for books in the Book House format is in preparation by the Danish Library Centre A/S

@Egan Newsletter

Good Luck Thane and Yana!; New Titles in ebrary Electronic Book Collection; Science Journals Reinstated; An Archive of Life Science Journals; Library Info Literacy Courses fight Infobesity!; Searching for a Specific Journal Article; Faculty Members Needed for Summer Weeding; Frank Fisher Bequest Added to the Egan Library Collectio

Impression management in the workplace: Research, theory and practice

A good comprehensive book is a rare find.If you are searching endlessly for a book that has it all, this is the one that presents every bit about impression management that one must know to get by in today’s world of advanced technology where everything is at our finger tips.The content covers from the most basic, that is, the meaning and nature of impression management (Chapter One), to the most complex yet a significant area that deals with the functional and dysfunctional consequences of impression management (Chapter Eleven)

Dynamic Ordered Sets with Exponential Search Trees

We introduce exponential search trees as a novel technique for converting static polynomial space search structures for ordered sets into fully-dynamic linear space data structures. This leads to an optimal bound of O(sqrt(log n/loglog n)) for searching and updating a dynamic set of n integer keys in linear space. Here searching an integer y means finding the maximum key in the set which is smaller than or equal to y. This problem is equivalent to the standard text book problem of maintaining an ordered set (see, e.g., Cormen, Leiserson, Rivest, and Stein: Introduction to Algorithms, 2nd ed., MIT Press, 2001). The best previous deterministic linear space bound was O(log n/loglog n) due Fredman and Willard from STOC 1990. No better deterministic search bound was known using polynomial space. We also get the following worst-case linear space trade-offs between the number n, the word length w, and the maximal key U < 2^w: O(min{loglog n+log n/log w, (loglog n)(loglog U)/(logloglog U)}). These trade-offs are, however, not likely to be optimal. Our results are generalized to finger searching and string searching, providing optimal results for both in terms of n.Comment: Revision corrects some typoes and state things better for applications in subsequent paper