This research project is carried out in a collaboration with David Raker, Education Department at Westfield State College and Rachel Lewellen, W.E.B. Du Bois Library at the University of Massachusetts. The goal of this research is to improve the abilities of K-12 students to find, evaluate, and organize information available on the Internet. These skills comprise a significant subset of the Information Literacy skills that Library Science teaches. These skills might have been optional when libraries, with their carefully selected materials, were the primary source of educational material. When the information source is disorganized and uncensored, as is the Internet, these skills are essential to a well-informed populace. The approach consists of building a Web search interface in which Information Literacy skills are matched to Information Retrieval (IR) tools in a way that teaches skills while helping students locate information on the Internet. Improved queries are created from the student's information need, supporting information from the surrounding educational environment, and query expansion from educationally-focused databases. Information filtering techniques identify, and if desired eliminate, retrieved information at the wrong grade-level or containing inappropriate content. Analysis of results is supported by extracting best document passages, frequent concepts, and proper names. Result sets are organized by clustering similar documents. Content evaluation is supported by citation analysis, and additional searches for supporting information. The results of the research will be tools and techniques to train a generation of students to find the information they need, quickly and reliably, in a disorganized and noisy medium. These skills are essential in a society based on free speech and many communication channels. The results will be disseminated through scholarly publications, through the Internet, and through industrial collaborations. http://ciir.cs.umass.edu/research/IIS-9812358
