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The Internet has become a favoured medium for the presentation and exchange of environmental and chemical data. To search for relevant information, the user either has to know the direct address of the Internet site, or has to use search engines and meta information repositories. In the latter case, the desired resource is described by a number of keywords, or descriptors. However, if too few descriptors are given, the answer set is immensely large. If too many or too specific descriptors are given, valuable information might be sorted out, because it lacks a particular descriptor. The Intelligent Cluster Index (ICIx) technology can remedy this situation. It generates a clustering of documents by their content characteristics. Applied in the described scenario this results in a grouping of Internet resources with comparable content. ICIx offers a similarity search facility based on the clustering. It allows the search for an arbitrary combination of descriptors. If an exact match is required, the result contains only documents matching all descriptors. In the similarity search, documents with comparable content – identified by the similarity clustering – can be included in the result set, even if they do not match all descriptors. Thus ICIx offers a wider range of relevant information in the answer than standard full text search provides.

Charitable Choice Policy, the heart of President Bush’s Faith‐Based Initiative, is the direct government funding of religious organizations for the purpose of carrying out government programs. The Bush presidential administration has called for the application of Charitable Choice Policy to all kinds of social services. Advocates for child‐abuse victims contend that the Bush Charitable Choice Policy would further dismantle essential social services provided to abused children. Others have argued Charitable Choice Policy is unconstitutional because it crosses the boundary separating church and state. Rather than drastically altering the US social‐policy landscape, this paper demonstrates that the Bush Charitable Choice Policy already is in place for childabuse services across many of the fifty states. One reason this phenomenon is ignored is due to the reliance on the public‐private dichotomy for studying social policies and services. This paper contends that relying on the public‐private dichotomy leads researchers to overlook important configurations of actors and institutions that provide services to abused children. It offers an alternate framework to the public‐private dichotomy useful for the analysis of social policy in general and, in particular, Charitable Choice Policy affecting services to abused children. Employing a new methodological approach, fuzzy‐sets analysis, demonstrates the degree to which social services for abused children match ideal types. It suggests relationships between religious organizations and governments are essential to the provision of services to abused children in the United States. Given the direction in which the Bush Charitable Choice Policy will push social‐policy programs, scholars should ask whether abused children will be placed in circumstances that other social groups will not and why.

IN 1946 there was in the British Isles a clear image of librarianship in most librarians' minds. The image depended on a librarian's professional environment which was of the widest possible range, not less in variation than the organisations, institutes or types of community which required library services. Generalisations are like cocoanuts but they provide for the quickest precipitation of variant definitions, after the stones have been thrown at them. A generalisation might claim that, in 1946, public librarians had in mind an image of a librarian as organiser plus technical specialist or literary critic or book selector; that university and institute librarians projected themselves as scholars of any subject with a special environmental responsibility; that librarians in industry regarded themselves as something less than but as supplementing the capacity of a subject specialist (normally a scientist). Other minor separable categories existed with as many shades of meaning between the three generalised definitions, while librarians of national libraries were too few to be subject to easy generalisation.