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A prototype front-end system—Cirt—which permits weighting, ranking and relevance feedback on a traditional IR system—Data—Star—is described and discussed. Cirt is based on an integrated theory of search term weighting, document ranking and modification of weights based on relevance feedback. Previous laboratory tests on various aspects of the theory have led to the need for further evaluation in an operational environment; the intention of Cirt is to make such evaluation possible. The operating environment is described and the design of the system is discussed, including the machine to machine host/front-end dialogue, the user interface and some aspects of the programming. A project currently under way to evaluate Cirt against traditional retrieval methods under operational conditions is described. The article concludes with a brief word on the future prospects for this type of retrieval.

This paper describes some tools that were written to help with the conversion of the card catalogue of a collection of cartoon drawings into an online catalogue. The tools described are an input program and a pair of special purpose editors that are used for checking and correcting the newly input catalogue records. The first of the editors is screen based but the second editor runs on a Sun workstation and has a user interface that uses the workstation's mouse and graphics. Also described is a graphical authority file editor that is integrated with the workstation editor.

We describe the results of empirical investigations that explore the effectiveness of moving graph diagrams to improve the comprehension of their structure. The investigations involved subjects playing a game that required understanding the structure of a number of graphs. The use of a game as the task was intended to motivate the exploration of the graph by the subjects. The results show that movement can be beneficial when there is nodenode or node-edge occlusion in the graph diagram but can have a detrimental effect when there is no occlusion, particularly if the diagram is small. We believe the positive result should generalise to other graph exploration tasks, and that graph movement is likely be useful as an additional graph exploration tool.

This paper describes a graph visualization method