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Public health officials use syndromic surveillance systems to facilitate early detection and response to infectious disease outbreaks. Emergency department clinical notes are becoming more available for surveillance but present the challenge of accurately extracting concepts from these text data. The purpose of this study was to implement a new system, Emergency Medical Text Classifier (EMT-C), into daily production for syndromic surveillance and evaluate system performance and user satisfaction. The system was designed to meet user preferences for a syndromic classifier that maximized positive predictive value and minimized false positives in order to provide a manageable workload. EMT-C performed better than the baseline system on all metrics and users were slightly more satisfied with it. It is vital to obtain user input and test new systems in the production environment.

Discusses information searching as a series of user decisions and considers the effects of the user's knowledge and the configuration of the information retrieval system. Investigates what the user needs to know to make informed search decisions at the United States Bureau of Labor Statistics Web site and describes user queries. (Author/LRW)

Describes the Statistical Interactive Glossary (SIG), an enhanced glossary of statistical terms supported by the GovStat ontology of statistical concepts. Presents a conceptual framework whose components articulate different aspects of a term's basic explanation that can be manipulated to produce a variety of presentations. The overarching criterion of effectiveness is whether the SIG helps users complete their statistical information tasks. (AEF)

Discusses research describing Web page and link classification systems resulting from a content analysis of over 75 Web pages. Topics include the decision-making processes of Web page authors and readers; syntactic analysis of labeled and isolated anchors; expansion and resource links; and where links lead. (Author/LRW)

Presents the results of an investigation of the use of links on Web pages; a content analysis was performed on 75 Web pages and their links. Results will provide a conceptual framework in which Web page design can be considered, including issues of authoring, retrieval, and built-in and on-the-fly guidance for reading and browsing. (Author/AEF)

Describes a method for automatically identifying sublanguage (SL) domain terms and revealing the patterns in which they occur in text. By applying this method to abstracts from a variety of disciplines, differences in how SL domain terminology occurs can be discerned. Findings indicate relatively consistent differences between the hard sciences and social sciences. (AEF)

Explains sublanguages in restricted domains in natural language processing and describes methods of comparing sublanguages through Case Hierarchy representation. Highlights include case grammar representations of natural language; case systems of sublanguages; sublanguage comparisons, including matching relationships and mapping relationships; and an example of a sublanguage comparison. (10 references) (LRW)

Describes the Case Hierarchy, a model of the case system of unconstrained natural language, and ways in which the case system is specialized in a restricted domain. Results of a feasibility study which examined the utility of the Case Hierarchy and the Case Hierarchy Tool (an intelligent editor supporting the domain analysis process) are presented. (14 references) (Author/MES)

As academic libraries are increasingly supported by a matrix of database functions, the use of data mining and visualization techniques offer significant potential for future collection development and service initiatives based on quantifiable data. While data collection techniques are still not standardized and results may be skewed because of granularity problems, faulty algorithms, and a host of other factors, useful baseline data is extractable and broad trends can be identified. The purpose of the current study is to provide an initial assessment of data associated with science monograph collection at the Marston Science Library (MSL), University of Florida. These sciences fall within the major Library of Congress Classification schedules of Q, S, and T, excluding TR, TT, and TX. The Rs are also excluded as these subjects are the responsibility of the Health Science Center Library which is connected with the medical school and the teaching hospital. The overall strategy of this project is to look at the potential science audiences within the university community and analyze data related to purchasing and circulation patterns, e-book usage, and interlibrary loan (ILL) statistics. This paper presents the results from the academic year July 1, 2008 to June 30, 2009, because all data reservoirs needed were available for the circulation and ILL data. The Springer e-book study is based on 2009 data. The research team consisted of both librarians and technical support staff from MSL, the Acquisitions Department, the Cataloging Department, and the IT Department. (Contains 1 table and 11 charts.)