H. Vernon Leighton

Publications in Library and Information Science

Leighton, H. Vernon and Diane May. “The Library Course Page and Instruction: Perceived Helpfulness and Use among Students.” Internet Reference Services Quarterly 18.2 (2013): 127-138. doi: 10.1080/10875301.2013.804019

Research guides can be divided largely into guides on particular subjects—subject guides—and guides tailored to the specific needs of courses—course pages. Recent studies indicate that online research guides are generally not helpful to college students unless the guides are linked to a course, either by being a course page or by being accompanied by an instruction session with the librarian. In this article, we report the findings of a study where students in a medium-sized (25 student), upper-division business course were asked about the helpfulness of a course page, the helpfulness of the librarian’s accompanying instruction session, and how much they used the page. The student survey used mostly Likert scale questions. The study also reports on the course page’s link traffic. Our results confirm earlier findings that a course page used in conjunction with librarian instruction is an effective tool to enhance student research. There were no control groups, and all respondents received both course page and instruction session. Seventy-one percent of the respondents indicated that the course page helpfulness ranged between “somewhat” and “very helpful,” and less than 10% of respondents said that they would not recommend a course page to other classes. Link traffic results indicate that neither a business subject guide nor a legal subject guide would have been as helpful to the respondents. These results support the argument that course pages should be preferred to subject guides when feasible.

May, Diane, and H. Vernon Leighton. “Using a Library-Based Course Page to Improve Research Skills in an Undergraduate International Business Law Course.” Journal of Legal Studies Education 30.2 (2013): 295-319. doi: 10.1111/jlse.12003

This article addresses the use of a library course page as a research guide in an undergraduate international business law course. It discusses the importance of global knowledge as a learning outcome and the historical development and the use of library course pages as tools to assist students. The article presents the results of a student survey to assess the Course Page and librarian presentation and a traffic log of the Course Page. The authors draw conclusions regarding the use of a library course page supplemented with a librarian presentation, as a tool to assist business students with legal research in an international business law course. The article ends with a detailed teaching note to assist teaching faculty replicate the process.

Leighton, H. Vernon, Joe Jackson, Kathy Sullivan, and Russ Dennison “Web Page Design and Successful Use: A focus group study.” Internet Reference Services Quarterly 8.3 (2003), 17-27.

The paper describes focus groups from 1999 at Winona State University which studied the usability of a library’s website. Two focus groups were asked to use Web pages that incorporated the elements under examination. While the users’ preferences were noted, the research team was more interested in which design elements affected the users’ ability to successfully find the information they were asked to locate. Whereas the authors’ findings agree in many cases with conventional tenets of good Web page design, variances in user success suggest that those designing library Web sites may have other usability factors to consider.

Leighton, H. Vernon. “Developing a new Data Archive in a Time of Maturing Standards.” IASSIST Quarterly 26 (Spring, 2002): 5-9.

A paper presented at the IASSIST Conference in Storrs, CT, in 2001. I had spent my sabbatical as the programmer for the Cultural Policy and the Arts National Data Archive at Princeton University. This paper describes some of the strategies used to minimize labor efforts when developing a new data archive. Some data archive software products are reviewed and critiqued. Basic scheme is to use a data entry friendly format to edit the codebook, then use PERL scripts to construct a DDI compliant codebook in XML. That XML codebook is then used by other scripts to generate a suite of data products, some using XSLT, for use in the archive. The project was managed by Elizabeth Bennett under the direction of Ann Gray. The subject expert was Larry McGill. The hard work was done by Winona Meltzer and Colleen Burlingham. From the programmming end, the CPANDA project was carried to completion by the very capable Andrew Dzhigo in 2003. The original URL for the project, which is now defunct, was at http://www.cpanda.org. I believe that the CPANDA resources were eventually folded into ICPSR.

Leighton, H. Vernon and Jaideep Srivastava. “First 20 Precision among World Wide Web Search Services (Search Engines).” Journal of the American Society for Information Science 50 (July 19, 1999): 870-881. doi: 10.1002/(SICI)1097-4571(1999)50:10<870::AID-ASI4>3.0.CO;2-G

A rewrite of our 1997 paper that studied precision among Web search services (see below). Although the data is the same, some of the findings and interpretations have changed. Significant revision from the web version below, including a rethinking of the concept of relevance. I have created a “green” open access version and have posted it on OpenRiver, the Winona State University institutional repository.

Leighton, H. Vernon and Jaideep Srivastava. Precision among World Wide Web Search Services (Search Engines): Alta Vista, Excite, Hotbot, Infoseek, Lycos.

Five search engines, Alta Vista, Excite, Hotbot, Infoseek, and Lycos, are compared for precision on the first twenty results returned for fifteen queries. All searching was done from January 31 to March 12, 1997. Steps have been taken to ensure that bias has not unduly influence the evaluation. Friedmann’s randomized block design is used to perform multiple comparisons for significance. Analysis shows that Alta Vista, Excite and Infoseek are the top three services, with their relative rank changing depending on how one interpreted the concept of “relevant.” This study was the final project for my Masters in Computer Science. I posted it to the Internet soon after the study was completed. According to Google Scholar, even the webpage version has been cited 71 times in the scholarly literature, while the peer-review version has been cited 244 times (as of November of 2025). In 2025, I have created a PDF version of the original set of webpages, and have posted it on my ResearchGate account.

Leighton, H. Vernon. Performance of Four World Wide Web (WWW) Index Services: Infoseek, Lycos, Webcrawler and WWWWorm. Webpage. Originally posted 20 October 1995. Revised and reposted in June of 1996.

This modest study of web search engines was a project for a graduate course in computer science at the University of Minnesota (“Performance Analysis of Computer Systems” taught by Prof. Lilja in the spring semester of 1995). I posted the results as a webpage in the fall of 1995, and it immediately began to be cited and discussed. I was criticized at the time for the lack of statistical and scientific rigor. I revised my report and reposted it in the summer of 1996. I also worked with my advisor to redesign the study, which turned into my “First 20 Precision” paper (above). According to Google Scholar, as of 20 December 2025, the original 1995 report or its 1996 revision have been cited 67 times in the scholarly literature. I was also asked by a lawyer working on an intellectual property case for a copy of the original 1995 webpage after the 1996 revision had replaced it. In 2025, I have created a PDF version of the original 1995 webpage report and a PDF version of the 1996 webpage revision, and have posted them on my ResearchGate account.

Leighton, H. Vernon. “Course Analysis: Techniques and Guidelines,” Journal of Academic Librarianship 21(May 1995): 175-179. doi: 10.1016/0099-1333(95)90036-5

Course analysis techniques have been developed since 1970 for academic libraries. The resulting course descriptions have been used in a wide range of library assessment and decision-making projects. This article compares many of the techniques and descriptive formats available and establishes principles for choosing among them. Briefly, course descriptions using classification schedules are less costly to create and are useful for analyzing the holdings of a  book collection arrange by subject classification, but course descriptions using subject headings are more useful for evaluating a collection that is not organized by a subject classification, such as a collection arranged by Superintendent of Documents call numbers or as a set of alerts for a database, such as PubMed.

Leighton, H. Vernon. “Electronic Availability Lists for U.S. Federal Document Depository Libraries: Opportunities and Realities,” Government Publications Review 19 (May/June 1992): 279-287.

In this paper, I explored the possibilities of creating needs and offers lists in electronic formats. The conclusion was that the logical electronic format was as an ascii text, and not as a structured and indexed database. NOTE from 2025: This argument was superseded by the FDLP eXchange.