IRE Opportunities for testing with online systems chapter Elizabeth D. Barraclough Butterworth & Company Karen Sparck Jones All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, including photocopying and recording, without the written permission of the copyright holder, application for which should be addressed to the Publishers. Such written permission must also be obtained before any part of this publication is stored in a retrieval system of any nature. References 135 evaluation. A much broader view is taken by Penniman and Dominick4 ranging from the theoretical basis for investigating interactions with computers to methods of analysis of the data collected, it provides a very good foundation for the practical evaluation of systems. 7.9 Conclusion Online systems are becoming one of the major sources of bibliographic information and yet few studies have been done to determine their effectiveness or methods of improving their performance. Such systems can yield, at little cost, a great deal of data which could be used to analyse the Systems at both the macro and the micro level. The expectation is that these tests would indicate where significant improvements could be made to current systems, the benefit would thus be much more immediate than tests in a static environment. The opportunity is there and should be used. References 1. ROUSE, S. H. and LANNOM, L. W. Some differences between three on-line Systems: impact on search results, On-line Review 1, 117-132 (1977) 2. LAWTON, S. B., AUSTER, E. and TO, D. A system evaluation of the educational information system for Ontario, Journal of the American Society for Information Science 30, 33[OCRerr]0 (1979) 3. DE JONG-HOFFMAN, M. W. Research into the practical results of on-line information retrieval: an extensive analysis, Aslib Proceedings 29, 197-208 (1977) 4. PENNIMAN, D. W. and DOMINICK, D. W. Monitoring & evaluation of on-line information system usage, Information Processing and Management 16, 17-35 (1980)