Williams, Martha, ed. 14th National Online Meeting Proceedings - 1993. Medford, NJ: Learned Information Inc., 1993. xii + 452 pp. US$55.00 paper ISBN 0-938734-73-3
Sixty two of the sixty eight papers reviewed and presented at the New York meeting are included in the Proceedings in varying fonts from camera-ready copy. Titles of the remaining presentations are also listed, and all papers are indexed in a combined author and subject index.
The papers could be said to cover 3 broad areas: information retrieval (including software development for specialised systems and online search strategy analysis), access (including network development, specialised services, their delivery and pricing, and library-based approaches), and databases (including design, content, indexing, and product development). In this respect the proceedings are similar in scope and content to the Australian Online and Ondisc Conference.
Typically for a meeting such as this, many of the papers are by practitioners who describe the development and state of services and systems with which they are associated. Although these services are North American, many are familiar to or of interest to readers elsewhere because of network availability. Despite this, there is surprisingly little reference to the Internet or to the knowbot-type software such as WWW and Archie that is associated with the Internet.
There are also a number of brief research reports into matters such as term selection during mediated searching, and improving precision of search results. These are complemented by some interesting diversions, such as Ercegovac's thoughts on design of databases to assist utilisation by socioeconomically disadvantaged users, and Cronin and Weaver-Wozniak's postulation of online access to acknowledgments as part of citations.
The detail in papers varies considerably with some being little more than abstracts. However information professionals, particularly those working as intermediaries on online systems would benefit from judicious browsing for current awareness.
Michael Middleton m.middleton@qut.edu.au
Last updated 16 March 1995