India: Demographics for Publishers

The essential demographic data and related information for India is provided specifically for the publishing industry. The focus has been placed on the economics, education and computer industry in relation to the complex cultural factors of different languages and religions. The role of India in relation to the other three BRIC countries or Brazil, China and Russia is explored.     

Searching strategies for the Bulgarian language

This paper reports on the underlying IR problems encountered when indexing and searching with the Bulgarian language. For this language we propose a general light stemmer and demonstrate that it can be quite effective, producing significantly better MAP (around + 34%) than an approach not applying stemming. We implement the GL2 model derived from the Divergence from Randomness paradigm and find its retrieval effectiveness better than other probabilistic, vector-space and language models. The resulting MAP is found to be about 50% better than the classical tf idf approach. Moreover, increasing the query size enhances the MAP by around 10% (from T to TD). In order to compare the retrieval effectiveness of our suggested stopword list and the light stemmer developed for the Bulgarian language, we conduct a set of experiments on another stopword list and also a more complex and aggressive stemmer. Results tend to indicate that there is no statistically significant difference between these variants and our suggested approach. This paper evaluates other indexing strategies such as 4-gram indexing and indexing based on the automatic decompounding of compound words. Finally, we analyze certain queries to discover why we obtained poor results, when indexing Bulgarian documents using the suggested word-based approach.     

Environmental health on the Net

All living organisms are affected by natural or induced modifications of their surrounding physical environment. A distinct relationship exists between the health of the environment and the health of the individuals living in it. This paper presents a selection of resources about environmental health resources readily accessible on the Internet in October 1998.     

MELVYL MEDLINE: a library services perspective

The MELVYL MEDLINE project resulted in the addition of a full five-year subset of MEDLINE to the University of California's (UC) MELVYL online union catalog. As one of the nation's largest MEDLINE end-user searching systems, MELVYL MEDLINE provides online bibliographic access to the biomedical journal literature for all UC personnel at over seventy library sites or by remote access. This paper summarizes the project's accomplishments, reports MELVYL MEDLINE use and its impact on library services, and provides insights for other end-user search systems. The project serves as a model for adding databases to the MELVYL catalog and demonstrates the potential for use by other disciplines of a specialized database when readily accessible. Evaluation results report high user satisfaction and high usage. However, many advanced searching features of the interface are little used by searchers. Effects on library services include marked increases in reference transactions and interlibrary loans, with significant declines in mediated search services. Future MELVYL MEDLINE enhancements include matching search retrievals to journal locations, linkage to an online document delivery system, and consideration of building a superset of databases by combining MELVYL MEDLINE with citations from another database in the MELVYL catalog.