This research is an effort to understand chat reference services through librarians' perceptions of successful and less successful chat reference service. Ten Academic libraries in Ohio and Pennsylvania which offered chat reference services were identified and 40 librarians were interviewed in order to address the research questions of this study. The main methodology used was the Critical Incident Technique (CIT) that is based on collecting and analyzing the most memorable experiences of human behavior in order to evaluate and identify ways to increase effectiveness of service. On-site, personal interviews were conducted with librarians who provide chat reference services. The subjects were initially asked to define chat reference service and compare it with traditional reference services. Following CIT procedures, they were then asked to recall and describe successful and less successful chat reference interactions and to make suggestions for better chat reference services. The interviews were transcribed and entered into a database for coding and content analysis of the collected data using qualitative data analysis software (MAXqda). Coded data were transformed into categories to determine and describe librarians' perceptions of chat reference services. The six major themes that emerged from this study were: 1-Characteristics of chat reference, 2-Attitudes of librarians and users, 3-Efficiency of reference interview and question negotiation, 4-Service improvement and management issues, 5-Training and review, and 6-Publicity and user awareness. These themes were discussed throughout the study. Findings from the recorded critical incidents indicate the importance of ``attitudes" of librarians and users, the role of question ``negotiation" and ``type", and the availability of ``resources" in successful chat reference service. The defining characteristics of chat reference, that it is online, remotely available and delivered through software raised issues of ``technology", ``chat software", ``service location" and ``service hours" which were also significant in defining service success. Furthermore, investigation of reference service quality criteria, evaluation measures and methods were explored by comparing literature on traditional and chat reference services and study findings. This study provides practical evaluation criteria for providing successful chat reference services in three categories based on: librarians' performance, chat software, and marketing issues. Further research for developing comprehensive digital reference evaluation criteria is recommended.

This study examines the career development factors and strategies used by public library directors whose library systems service a population of 100,000 or more. The intent is to research the directors own use of these factors and strategies, their perceived importance to the directors career development and finally strategies recommended by the directors for use by middle level public library managers. This study addresses all three areas and produces a comparison of factor/strategy use vs. importance vs. suggested use. An integral part of this research includes tables showing the significance of relationships among the selected strategies as well as among the external factors of age, gender, geographic mobility and luck/serendipity. Independently recommended strategies are also provided by the directors for potential adoption by the middle-level manager. As such, the findings of this study may be used as a possible reference point to assist public library middle level managers in their own successful career development.

Meta Search Engines are finding tools developed for enhancing the search performance by submitting user queries to multiple search engines and combining the search results in a unified ranked list. They utilized data fusion technique, which requires three major steps: databases selection, the results combination, and the results merging. This study tries to build a framework that can be used for merging the search results retrieved from any set of search engines. This framework based on answering three major questions: 1.How meta-search developers could define the optimal rank order for the selected engines. 2. How meta-search developers could choose the best search engines combination. 3. What is the optimal heuristic merging function that could be used for aggregating the rank order of the retrieved documents form incomparable search engines. The main data collection process depends on running 40 general queries on three major search engines (Google, AltaVista, and Alltheweb). Real users have involved in the relevance judgment process for a five point relevancy scale. The performance of the three search engines, their different combinations and different merging algorithm have been compared to rank the database, choose the best combination and define the optimal merging function. The major findings of this study are (1) Ranking the databases in merging process should depends on their overall performance not their popularity or size; (2)Larger databases tend to perform better than smaller databases; (3)The combination of the search engines should depend on ranking the database and choosing the appropriate combination function; (4)Search Engines tend to retrieve more overlap relevant document than overlap irrelevant documents; and (5) The merging function which take the overlapped documents into accounts tend to perform better than the interleave and the rank similarity function. In addition to these findings the study has developed a set of requirements for the merging process to be successful. This procedure include the databases selection, the combination, and merging upon heuristic solutions.

Despite centuries of organizing information in libraries and other information institutions, little is known about how a document is analyzed to determine its subject matter. This case study is a qualitative exploration to better understand the processes involved in the conceptual analysis of documents. Conceptual analysis, an essential step in the subject analysis process, is the attempt by a cataloger or indexer to determine the subject matter, or the aboutness, of a document. The purpose of this research is to examine how interested yet untrained participants perform the tasks of conceptual analysis when no process is suggested. The study uses observation, think-aloud procedures, and in-depth, semi-structured interviews to understand the participants subject determination processes. Transcripts of the analysis sessions and interviews were examined for underlying patterns of analysis. The aims of this research are to understand how individuals approach the process of determining aboutness, what bibliographic, content, or visual cues they use to find key aboutness data, and what patterns emerge during the subject determination process. This research begins an attempt to develop a model of conceptual analysis to be used in teaching, research, and praxis.

An intelligent approach to design tasks

Information Seeking

Information retrieval systems

A proposal including a study of its problems and prospects

CFTRI s research publications

space technologists with emphasis