Information Storage & Retrieval Books

The Invisible Web: Uncovering Information Sources Search Engines Can't See

Gary Price, Chris Sherman

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Subjects -> Computers & Internet -> Business & Culture -> Culture

Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 10 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Enormous expanses of the Internet are unreachable with standard web search engines. This book provides the key to finding these hidden resources by identifying how to uncover and use invisible web resources. Mapping the invisible Web, when and how to use it, assessing the validity of the information, and the future of Web searching are topics covered in detail. Only 16 percent of Net-based information can be located using a general search engine. The other 84 percent is what is referred to as the invisible Web—made up of information stored in databases. Unlike pages on the visible Web, information in databases is generally inaccessible to the software spiders and crawlers that compile search engine indexes. As Web technology improves, more and more information is being stored in databases that feed into dynamically generated Web pages. The tips provided in this resource will ensure that those databases are exposed and Net-based research will be conducted in the most thorough and effective manner.

Internet Explorer 6 for Dummies

Doug Lowe

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 1.0 of 5

DOES NOT HELP WITH 7.O 1 out of 5 stars.
1 of 1 people found this review helpful.

My Netscape stopped working so I bought this book, even though I have Explorer 7.0. There is no help for 7.0. The mail system sucks and I really, really, really, hate this program! If anyone has a better plan of attack please let me know...............

Good luck!!

Susi J.

Editorial Review:

Internet Explorer 6 For Dummies covers the essentials new PC or IE users need to know about hooking up to the Internet for Web browsing, e-mail, and other tasks. This guide includes coverage of getting on the Internet, Web browsing with IE, e-mail with Outlook Express, customizing IE, and creating Web pages. Most important, it covers the enhanced features of the new version including the updated Interface.

Researching Online for Dummies (with CD-ROM)

Reva Basch, Mary Ellen Bates

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Editorial Review:

Although this Dummies book is in the typical informal and irreverent beginner's style, even the most competent searcher will find it invaluable. Author Reva Basch has written the gold standard for books about online research. Wired magazine calls her "the ultimate intelligent agent" for a very good reason. Basch doesn't just give you information on search engines and how to use them. She takes you into the mindset of a professional Net cybrarian, sharing the essential truth about online research. (There is a huge difference between surfing and searching.) In chapters such as "Thinking and Working Like a Researcher," you learn what to do when presented with 42,178 hits--or worse, no hits at all--when using a search engine. Even when you hit pay dirt, Basch explains the importance of evaluating the information you find to make sure it's relevant and accurate.

Basch covers specialty search engines, subject-based catalogs, reference sites, online libraries, and for-pay information services. She takes you to the places where the experts hang out in newsgroups, mailing lists, and online conferencing systems. One especially helpful chapter deals with the mysteries of researching government, medical, and sci-tech information online. The discussion then moves to business-related research, online publications, and many other resources. Then she reveals that sometimes you have to go offline to get what you need and includes helpful print sources.

This terrific volume concludes with the famous Dummies "Part of Tens," including Ten Timeless Truths about Search Engines and Ten Clarifying Questions for Better Research Results. The accompanying CD-ROM has three bonus chapters: "Life Choices," about using the Net to find information on finding a college, a car, a job, and other necessities; "Recreational Interests: Hobbies, Interests, and Leisure-Time Pursuits"; and "Ten Simple Tune-ups for Streamlined Searching." A bonus section on Boolean searches contains one of the better discussions of that misunderstood subject. --Elizabeth Lewis

The Web Library: Building a World Class Personal Library with Free Web Resources

Nicholas Tomaiuolo

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 16 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

With this remarkable, eye-opening book and its companion Web site, Nicholas G. (Nick) Tomaiuolo shows how anyone can create a comprehensive personal library using no-cost Web resources. And when Nick says "library," he's not talking about a dictionary and thesaurus on your desktop: he means a vast, rich collection of data, documents, and images that--if you follow his instructions to the letter--can rival the holdings of many traditional libraries. If you were to calculate the expense of purchasing the hundreds of print and fee-based electronic publications that are available for free with "The Web Library" you'd quickly recognize the potential of this book to save you thousands, if not millions of dollars (fortunately, Nick does the calculating for you!). This is an easy-to-use guide, with chapters organized into sections corresponding to departments in a physical library. "The Web Library provides a wealth of URLs and examples of free material you can start using right away, but, best of all, it offers techniques for finding and collecting new content as the Web evolves. Start building your personal Web library today!

Modern Information Retrieval

Ricardo Baeza-Yates, Berthier Ribeiro-Neto

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Excellent as a textbook and a practical guide 5 out of 5 stars.
8 of 8 people found this review helpful.

I used this book as a textbook in a course on information storage and retrieval that I took a few years back, and it is still my favorite book on the subject. It explains the concepts clearly yet has all of the necessary mathematical and algorithmic details needed to work with the subject matter.
Chapter one just acts as a guide to the rest of the book. The book is basically divided into four parts: text IR, human-computer interfacing for IR, multimedia IR, and applications of IR. The part on text IR is best for beginners trying to learn the overall subject of IR, and consists of chapters 2 through 9. Chapter 2 is a long and important chapter that introduces fundamental concepts in IR and lays foundations for later chapters. Models for "ranking" documents based on queries are presented, including the boolean, vector, probabilistic, and fuzzy models. Chapter 3 is far less technical than chapter 2 and focuses on evaluation of IR models. Chapter 4 is an introduction to query languages, which are necessary for the elegant presentation of complex queries. Chapter 5 deals with query operations, which is the transformation of queries from simple keywords into weighted sets of terms and also includes user feedback. As in previous chapters, there is quite a bit of mathematics involved. Chapter 6 is devoted to text languages such as HTML and SGML since the user might refer to the structure of a document in his/her query, and that structure must be defined somewhere. Chapter 7 is about operations on documents themselves for the purpose of simplifying them for quick search. Thus, it is important as a time saver to eliminate common words such as "the" and also to reduce words to their grammatical roots. The potentially large size of document collections requires special indexing techniques for efficient retrieval. This is the subject of Chapter 8. Query processing can be further accelerated by using the parallel and distributed IR techniques discussed in Chapter 9, which concludes the book's discussion of text IR.
Chapter 10 is a stand-alone chapter on HCI for IR that discusses the design of user interfaces that assist the user in forming a query and current approaches for visualization of large data sets.
Multimedia IR is discussed in chapters 11 and 12. Models and query languages for office and medical information systems are discussed in Chapter 11. Efficient indexing and searching of multimedia objects is discussed in Chapter 12.
The final three chapters of the book are about the applications of IR. There is a chapter each about searching the web, bibliographic systems, and digital libraries.
The chapter on text languages is starting to show its age, as are the chapters on IR applications at the end of the book. The chapters on algorithms, and particularly the algorithmic portions of the chapters on text IR cause this book to remain a worthwhile read. There is quite a bit of mathematics used in this book, and probability theory in particular. Thus, the reader should already be familiar with probability theory and the basics of pattern recognition to get the most from this book.

Editorial Review:

This is a rigorous and complete textbook for a first course on information retrieval from the computer science (as opposed to a user-centred) perspective. The advent of the Internet and the enormous increase in volume of electronically stored information generally has led to substantial work on IR from the computer science perspective - this book provides an up-to-date student oriented treatment of the subject.

The Information Broker's Handbook

Sue Rugge, Alfred Glossbrenner

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 9 Average rating: 4.5 of 5

Solid Basic of Starting an Information Brokering Business 4 out of 5 stars.
19 of 19 people found this review helpful.

In contrast to Mary Ellen's book, this book is actually for self-starters who are thinking about creating their own small business and covers such excellent basics as the market for information, what an information broker does, the pros and cons of the information business, and then the tools, followed by chapters on marketing, pricing, and project management. Although seven years old now, I still regard this as a good starting point for those who would understand the information brokering business (a small niche within the larger open source intelligence business).

Editorial Review:

Turn the Net's info revolution into a do-it-yourself business. Having a passion for uncovering obscure Net data? Turn your passion into a rewarding career with the Third Edition of The Information Broker's Handbook, by Sue Rugge and Alfred Glossbrenner. The world's leading information broker, Rugge shares her research and business secrets alike-showing you how to get started brokering information, stay successful and grow as you do. It's all here-guidelines for setting prices, tips for drawing up contracts, billing do's and don'ts-plus the hands-on help you need to: market yourself as an expert information broker and build a roster of high-paying clients; get your hands on FREE or low-cost information you can re-package and sell; turn data from the Net, Web, libraries, public records, BBSs, SIGs, online databases and other sources into sought-after intelligence; exploit the latest connectivity hardware and software-from browsers and ISDN lines to high-speed modems and CD-ROMs.

Yahoo! for Dummies

Brad Hill

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 4 Average rating: 3.5 of 5

A revelation 5 out of 5 stars.
23 of 23 people found this review helpful.

I've used Yahoo for years, but I never knew what I was missing until I took a chance on this book. It's definitely worth buying! The book treats Yahoo like more than just a Web site....like an online service. I'm using Yahoo even more than I did before, and getting more out of my online time. I never knew about Yahoo Companion or how to talk with somebody for free, anywhere in the world....I've got my family across the country using it now, and saving money off the phone bill. Very useful book....lots of humor....really opened my eyes to Yahoo.

Editorial Review:

Yahoo! For Dummies, 2nd Edition hits the shelves with refreshed information on Yahoo!'s most popular and useful features. Author Brad Hill covers registering for Yahoo!, customizing it to deliver the content of one's choosing, and getting a Yahoo! e-mail account. The book also guides you through using Yahoo!'s Web page design and hosting service (GeoCities), it's multimedia broadcast center (Broadcast), and its variety of shopping and financial services.

Hands-On Information Literacy Activities

Jane Birks, Fiona Hunt

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Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

This comprehensive collection of interactive learning activities is designed to develop key information literacy skills - determining the nature and extent of the information need; accessing information; evaluating information and sources; and adhering to ethical practices in the use of information. The included activities for over 20 instructional sessions support a variety of learning styles. All have been tested successfully with both secondary school and undergraduate college students, including ESL students. Exercises focus on the library catalog, search engines, databases, search strings, Boolean and advanced searching, and types of information. The organization is flexible allowing you to use the lessons in any order or any grouping that meets the needs of your students and situation. A particularly useful feature for instructors provides the expected or desired answer to discussion questions and exercises within square brackets. The package includes a CD-ROM with all of the activity materials and handouts included in Microsoft Word format for easy customization.

Text Information Retrieval Systems (Library and Information Science) (Library and Information Science)

Charles T. Meadow, Bert R. Boyce, Donald H. Kraft

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 1 Average rating: 4.0 of 5

Editorial Review:

Information retrieval is a communication process that links the information user to a librarian, museum curator, fingerprint identification specialist, or whoever is in charge of a collection of what we are calling documents. The communication will normally involve the processing of text, strings of words known to both parties in the process that can be used to describe a document's content and other attributes and link it with a need expressed in similar terms. This book's purpose is to teach people who will be searching or designing text retrieval systems how the systems work. For designers, it covers problems they will face and reviews currently available solutions to provide a basis for more advanced study. For the searcher its purpose is to describe why such systems work as they do. The book is primarily about computer-based retrieval systems, but the principles apply to nonmechanized ones as well.
The book covers the nature of information, how it is organized for use by a computer, how search functions are carried out, and some of the theory underlying these functions. As well, it discusses the interaction between user and system and how retrieved items, users, and complete systems are evaluated. A limited knowledge of mathematics and of computing is assumed.
The first edition of this work appeared just before the World Wide Web came on the scene, but was nonetheless a student favorite because of its clarity. The new edition is updated and expanded, covering not only the Web but also new developments in how IR systems are or could be designed.

Key Features
* Helps users understand why things happen the way they do and thus aids users in designing new systems, evaluating systems before use, and teaching or using IR systems
* Provides an understanding of basic principles so that users may read, understand, and evaluate detailed works such as the many research papers on this topic
* Explains complex mathematical models so that readers may become familiar with the underlying mathematical concepts of IR systems

Information Representation and Retrieval in the Digital Age (Asist Monograph Series)

Heting Chu

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Customer Reviews:
Total reviews: 2 Average rating: 5.0 of 5

A first-rate resource for dedicated students 5 out of 5 stars.
3 of 5 people found this review helpful.

Information Representation And Retrieval In The Digital Age by Heting Chu (Associate Professor, Palmer School of Library and Information Science, Long Island University), is a scholarly study of the history, development, and science of information representation and retrieval from the turn of the 20th century to the modern day. Studying means of indexing, summarizing, issues of language in information retrieval, query representation, user dimensions including the cognitive model, artificial intelligence in information representation and retrieval, and much more, Information Representation And Retrieval In The Digital Age is a first-rate resource for dedicated students and current practitioners of information technology, an invaluable addition to academic Library Science reference collections and curriculum reading lists.

Editorial Review:

Text offers a comprehensive view of Information Representation and Retrieval (IRR). Emphasizes principles and fundamentals, reviewing key concepts and major developmental stages of the field. For students or practitioners needed broad and current knowledge of this topic in information science. DLC: Information organization.