Interviews with 75 graduate school faculty members in the science and engineering departments at Florida State university have revealed that 46 of the interviewed faculty members maintain personal indexes.The structure of these personal indexes, their size, rate of growth, frequency of use, physical form, and other characteristics are given and discussed.

Industrial and academic users of online bibliographic searching over a year's time did not generally diminish their amount of use of other traditional manual means of information gathering activities. However, in comparison to less frequent users and nonusers, frequent users increased their reliance on librarians. Online users increased their appraisal of the adequacy of information services available to them, particularly as regards those aspects generally considered the primary benefits of online searching. Users positively increased their assessment of the utility of online searches to their work, and online bibliographic searching capability was subsequently adopted as a permanent feature in both the industrial and academic work settings.

If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation.Abstract: Mediated free online bibliographic search services were offered to 70 academic chemists and 262 industrial scientists and technologists. Consistent with earlier studies of users and nonusers of computer-readable bibliographic databases, generally negligible differences were found. Nor were the correlates of use in an industrial setting generally replicated in an academic setting. However, prior information 'style', satisfaction with more traditional information resources, and attitudinal predisposition to the possible utility of online search services have some small effect on subsequent usage of online services.

Question analysis and search strategy development, two major components in the process of answering reference questions, were characterized as nine decision making steps. Twenty‐eight reference questions were analyzed in terms of these nine steps. The answers to each step were examined to determine whether rules for performing the individual steps by machine could be developed. Reasons are given for concluding that it would be very difficult, if not impossible, to have these reference process steps performed by machine.