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The purpose of this paper is to report a study of how the test instrument of a simulated work task situation is used in empirical evaluations of interactive information retrieval (IIR) and reported in the research literature. In particular, the author is interested to learn whether the requirements of how to employ simulated work task situations are followed, and whether these requirements call for further highlighting and refinement.

In order to study how simulated work task situations are used, the research literature in question is identified. This is done partly via citation analysis by use of Web of Science®, and partly by systematic search of online repositories. On this basis, 67 individual publications were identified and they constitute the sample of analysis.

The analysis reveals a need for clarifications of how to use simulated work task situations in IIR evaluations. In particular, with respect to the design and creation of realistic simulated work task situations. There is a lack of tailoring of the simulated work task situations to the test participants. Likewise, the requirement to include the test participants’ personal information needs is neglected. Further, there is a need to add and emphasise a requirement to depict the used simulated work task situations when reporting the IIR studies.

Insight about the use of simulated work task situations has implications for test design of IIR studies and hence the knowledge base generated on the basis of such studies.

Simulated work task situations are widely used in IIR studies, and the present study is the first comprehensive study of the intended and unintended use of this test instrument since its introduction in the late 1990’s. The paper addresses the need to carefully design and tailor simulated work task situations to suit the test participants in order to obtain the intended authentic and realistic IIR under study.

During the year 2000 over 100 Australian libraries across all sectors participated in a comprehensive study of interlending and document delivery. The study used a survey to measure costs, turnaround time, fill rate and user satisfaction. The survey was based on the Association of Research Libraries study, Measuring the Performance of Interlibrary Loan Operations, conducted by Mary Jackson with North American research libraries. The article reports on the following findings and implications for Australian libraries: what distinguishes high performing document delivery operations in 2000; what the costs are; whether there are differences between sectors; how the study will be applied to improve Australia’s national resource sharing system.

Presents a summary of the latest in the series of international conferences on interlending and document supply. Whilst co‐operation between researchers, publishers and librarians was the main theme of the Conference, other topics discussed included union catalogues, standards, digitisation and national systems.

The consequences of electronic publishing continue to manifest themselves in the 110 journals scanned for this literature review. Pricing, access, e‐books and e‐journals are amongst the issues considered in this issue’s literature review. Further criticism of the publishing sector is identified and the potential for micro payments.

The aim of this exploratory study is to analyze if the most used factors related to the engaging interaction and long-term engagement with online applications can be applied to WhatsApp in a context of everyday life in Madrid and to investigate what parameters would best describe the engagement with WhatsApp in this context.

A qualitative method was employed to explore the cognitive, emotional and behavioral factors that mainly comprise the experience of a user with an online application, both at a point in time and over time. Data from 30 semi-structured interviews and questionnaires from six group chats were collected and analyzed. The sample was made up of people aged from 13 to 58 years old.

Findings suggest that the factors used in this study to evaluate long-term engagement and engaging interactions with WhatsApp are relevant, except for cognitive factors related to engaging interactions, indicating that the cognitive point of view is more difficult to apply in the engaging interaction analysis. Other attributes related to information retrieval are suggested, best suited to the informative use of this tool.

Long-term engagement studies are scarcer concerning Mobile Instant Messaging applications. Regarding engagement interaction, its analysis focusing on WhatsApp has not been approached. This study suggests the convenience of using parameters related to information to evaluate the engaging interaction, according to the informative use of the application.