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This investigation is a large scale study of the real world Web information seeking activity of 1,050 full-time undergraduates studying at a UK higher education institution. The study takes the form of a transaction log analysis of a Web log which records over a two year period all the 1,990,488 URLs requested by the students during 46,558 daily sessions. The analysis focuses on how individual students seek Web information. This is made possible by each user being (anonymously) identified throughout the Web log. Both longitudinal and non-longitudinal or repeat study analyses are undertaken. The analyses make use of a novel session-conformance metric which measures the similarity/dissimilarity of the collection of Website requests made during each session. Over time student-users become more individually distinctive in respect of their 'Web territories' or the collections of Websites which they visit and revisit during each session. Student-users become more territorial in that they increasingly locate their Web information resources from within their own Web territories. 'Searching' occurs in only half of all sessions and student-users undertake less 'searching' as their Web territories become more strongly developed. These findings are interpreted using the notion of a personal Web information infrastructure which is based on Marchionini's idea of a personal information infrastructure (Marchionini, 1995). A student-user's personal Web information infrastructure is represented by his (or her) territory. As student-users become more proficient at locating Web information resources to satisfy their individual information needs so they build or strengthen their personal Web information infrastructures.

This thesis presents an approach for supporting the information access requirements of engineering designers. Technical and cultural factors are increasing the quantity of information that is available to designers. As a consequence, they require improved tools not just to retrieve this information but also to allow it to be organised and classified into meaningful structures to assist in its management. The research has been undertaken from two interrelated standpoints. The first focused on empirical studies of the information access requirements of practising designers. The second concerned the development, based on the key findings from the initial studies, of classification structures for aerospace design information and their incorporation in a computer-based information system. The empirical studies of designers were carried out in two separate stages. The first involved the characterisation of the information usage of a range of engineering designers with different backgrounds. The results indicated important differences in the usage and storage of information between designers. The second study examined documents used by practising designers. From this, a number of core classification scheme types were identified that allow information to be organised from a variety of user perspectives. The results of the empirical studies informed the development of a novel information system based on a combination of. (i) faceted-like, automatic, non-mutually exclusive classification principles and (ii) a hybrid browsing approach that `prunes' the browsable classification scheme, according to concept selections made by the user. The system overcomes some of the usual problems of browsing classification structures and allows the inference of linked relationships between different classification categories. This represents a powerful feature that is beyond the capabilities of existing search approaches. The benefits of the system, when applied to a number of typical engineering information search scenarios, are discussed followed by an evaluation of the approach. Finally, a number of conclusions and suggestions for future research are suggested.

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No description available.

No description available.

No description available.

No description available.