Www-based Information Inquiry Service

In the networking environment, information service is no longer confined to the traditional modes of manually searching and browsing printed materials. The World Wide Web (WWW) provides a channel for transmitting and publishing digitized information. The uses of the Internet raise users' awareness of the importance of information and accustom them to information search. They also contribute to the heterogeneity of users' information needs and their growing expectations for the improvement of the quality of information services. However, the overabundance of old and new information, and rapid emergence of web-based search engines have generated a great amount of redundant search results and affected the efficiency and accuracy in terms of users' search efforts. Given this situation, it is worthwhile to take a look at the information services available on the WWW from the end users' perspective.Network information services are based on network information search. The peculiarity of information search in the networking environment lies in the multimedia characteristics of information as a result of wide distribution and digitization of data sources, which makes it more complicated for our research, to some extent. Since there exist various types of users from various social strata, the information they need comes from different layers of sources. Such layering is based on an open information service system with its inherent information resources. Users are the incentive for organizing and optimizing these resources. We define users to be those people who receive and employ information in their various research and teaching activities. Generally speaking, they have little formal training in computerized management or information search. They are customarily known as common users, or end users as above mentioned. End users elicit information from systems continuously, often to a given end, but they have considerable differences from professional users of information systems in terms of needs and habits. Although online information systems are backed up by high-quality, reliable databases, users are constrained by factors such as prices, search capabilities and search methods, and puzzled by a surfeit of similar systems available on the market. Thus, users are often left in a dilemma as to effective utilization of these systems.This paper presents a unique analysis and evaluation of the networked information service systems from the perspective of end users instead of system professionals. Despite the miraculous growth of information technologies, information service providers tend to focus their attention on search techniques and technological changes, but overlook end users whom their services are supposed to target. However, users' awareness of, needs for and behavior related to information are vital to the improvement of information search services. Thus, the paper zeros in on end users, the direct targets of information service, to analyze their characteristics and the diversity and complexity of their information needs in light of the informationized environment in which networked information search services arose and of the evolution of these services. Based on this analysis, the paper goes further to make an in-depth, detailed comparative study of two well-known information service systems, i.e. OCLC FirstSearch and DIALOG. Since both are powerful systems in relatively common use, capable of organization, search and provision of information and oriented toward end users, they make representative subjects of a case study of the information service systems residing on the WWW.The purpose of this paper is to underscore the importance for web-based information service systems to emphasize end users' information needs, provide user-friendly interfaces, enhance the quality of service, and validate the criteria for service charges, with a view to accommodating users' extensive, dynamic, synthetic, and multi-layered information needs and diverse means of information search. On the other hand, end users oug...