Mika Koshizuka

New information services such as CD-ROMs, online databases and internet are becoming popular in the public libraries. 'Fee or free' problem and user support (user education) are two of many problems which have to be considered concerning to such services. In this article, a case study on four libraries in U.S. and Canada is reported.

Concepts and context are reviewed in the light of "digital literacy" to set the framework of the problems, tasks, and common interest. Government actions taken in Japan are reviewed in terms of providing access to digital knowledge, creating information literacy such as in schools, higher education, and life-long education, etc. Tasks, which have been found during the recent development in Japan, are explored for common interest to be shared with advanced as well as developing countries. Possibilities shall be discussed for the future international cooperation.

Studies and surveys on "information use" are getting more important in the information society. Information Use Research Section was established at R&D Department, National Center for Science Information Systems in April 1997. This article discusses studies on information use behavior and information use education in the library and information science from the viewpoint of "Information Use Studies."

The purpose of this paper is to consider how the electronic resources can change the studies of literature based on the information seeking behavior of scholars in German literature. They set high value on Arts & Humanities Index database that is a citation index database although they did low value on bibliographic databases. Because it is necessary for them to browse those materials directly, and the visual information like binding of books is one of the criterion to tell if they are useful for their studies or not. Full text databases and/or electronic texts provide new opportunities for...

There are a few research work on information seeking and/or information organization in offices. This article discusses information seeking behavior and personal file organizations in offices. Spatial information, colors, forms of materials and usage time provide useful index to recall their contents and find a certain intended materials.

"Browsing" is an important activity to many researchers in humanities. It is generally differentiated from "searching." The differences between them are resulted from the level of three types of knowledge: content of information that researchers want to know, search path to reach useful information, and location to get it. One of the remarkable feature of browsing is "serendipity", that is a kind of ability to stumble upon relevant items. Browsing with serendipity plays an essential role on research not only as a means of getting information, but also of locating them into space of a resear...

This paper gives an overview of digital libray researches. First we make their features clear by describing (1) what kind of data are stored, (2) what kind of search methods are realized, and (3) what kind of browsing methods can be used. Then, we describe mqjor digital libraries which have been developed in the United States, Japan and European countries. Finally, we discuss some problems and future works on digital libraries.

The visual images has occupied a important role in humanities research. This paper surveys cognitive frameworks of visual images in the context of indexing them by two experiments of assigning indexing terms to images. Results of the indexing experiment by using 85 visual images reveal that the indexing method of images require the standard indexing procedure based on cognitive view in order to increase the number of assigned indexing terms and to reduce inconsistency between indexers. An cognitive framework model are presented by results of the another indexing experiment.

This paper describes enhancement of the search functions in NACSIS-IR, the online information retrieval service of NACSIS, National Center for Science Information Systems. The system adopts an advanced text retrieval system as a search engine. Features of the enhanced search functions are as follows ; the advanced proximately operation and search using the term frequency, 3-level-structured database, sophisticated display function, the thesaurus databases with flexible structure, the search expantion using the thesaurus databases, enhancement of the user and functions, the standadization of...