This case study focuses on the role of language in managing organizational change. We examined the campaign and rhetorical strategies used by a major US airline to persuade customer service employees not to vote for Teamsters Union representation. The company's anti-union campaign documents included internal memos, letters, and emails. If included in a professional or technical communication course, these documents provide a powerful case for students to explore the role of written communication within a changing organization. We situate the case in the context of relevant literature and provide background information. We also include learning outcomes, methods, and implications.

Virtual teams face challenges arising from geographical distance, cultural differences, and differing modes of interaction. Team leaders in particular face these challenges because they are primarily responsible for efficient team management. Technology choices made by leaders have become a focus of interest in communication studies, but questions regarding media choice in virtual teams have not been widely studied. This article describes an in-depth, ethnographic exploration of Finnish virtual team leaders who work in natural teams in organizational contexts. The principal goal was to examine their choice of communication technologies in daily work. The results indicate that the choice was based on four factors. First, there are two factors that are person-related: ACCESSIBILITY and SOCIAL DISTANCE. Accessibility refers to people's ease of access through a particular medium, and social distance suggests that the technology selection is based on the social distance between the persons involved. Second, there are two task-related factors: idea sharing and informing. These factors describe team leaders' media selection by the nature of the task at hand. The findings suggest that team leaders' technology choice can be partly explained by traditional media selection theories, but in virtual contexts, accessibility becomes an important determinant of which technology is chosen.

Technical communicators can and should play an important role in the development of information systems to improve the usability of the systems. Besides writing user guides and training material, technical communicators can engage in four other tasks to add value to information systems development: acting as user advocate, writing online help, writing system and error messages, and providing advice on interface design. We assert that technical communicators' involvement in systems development should not be tied to a particular development methodology. Instead, they should be associated with four general tasks in systems development: system investigation, analysis, design, and implementation. We then discuss some notable human factors and their impacts on the tasks performed by technical communicators. Three cognitive mapping techniques-causal mapping, semantic mapping, and concept mapping-are introduced as a means to elicit an individual's belief system regarding a problem domain. These cognitive mapping techniques have great potential for overcoming some behavioral and cognitive problems as well as facilitating understanding among stakeholders in the development of information systems. We discuss how technical communicators can apply various cognitive mapping techniques to improve the usability of the resulting information systems. The use of these techniques is illustrated using a case study.

This article explores the dialogic negotiation processes that can enable professional communication academics and practitioners to collaborate in designing, implementing, and writing up research. Drawing on our experiences conducting a collaborative academic-practitioner case study of technical sales presentations in an executive briefing center, we outline the ways in which we dialogically negotiated research questions, data collection and analysis, theoretical frameworks, organizational contexts, identifications, and interpersonal connections. We then discuss potential limitations of academic-practitioner collaborations and conclude by offering a tentative, contextual list of "best practices" for facilitating successful collaboration across the academic-practitioner divide.

This article reports on the utility of personal digital assistants (PDAs) for processing information needed in coordinated, team-based medical work. The author first presents results from a survey of medical professionals, which reveal that medical professionals read PDA-based texts nonlinearly, in short bursts, and without need of a narrative-based organization. The respondents also reported using PDAs to support a range of team-based activities. The author then presents results of a case study of veterinary students using PDAs on clinical rotations. He discusses how the PDA affords uses of text-based information that are suited to medical work that is carried out with the cooperative assistance of people and technologies. After discussing how veterinary students used PDAs to organize information into ad hoc texts, he concludes with challenges and information design guidelines for professional writers in the medical field.

This study contributes to a discussion on collaboration and technical/professional communication in indeterminate zones or less familiar sites for collaboration. The interdisciplinary group for this case study collaborated to write a project proposal to solicit funds from the US government for constructing a test bed for immune buildings as a tactic for combating potential biological and chemical terrorist incidents. Their approach to collaboration coincided with several approaches previously addressed in professional and technical communication research. Novel and creative approaches emerged as a result of this collaboration, but in some instances, disciplinary differences, as manifested by disputes over concepts and terminologies, posed obstacles to collaboration. Such challenges necessitated strong leadership, which was also critical for managing group process.

Electronic collaboration has become a driver for productivity as organizations develop linkages for the planning, sourcing, and execution of goods and services. These organizations require mechanisms to harness the diverse and personalized intellectual resources that are distributed across the world. While electronic collaboration technologies have made it possible to harness intellectual resources across space and time, knowledge management is locked in a paradox of perception-the more valuable a knowledge resource is seen to be, the less it is shared. This paper develops a framework for the activation of knowledge that relies on a view of knowledge-as-identity. The analysis of a case study reveals "activation conditions" that delineate processes in which electronic collaboration technologies can be most effective. This has implications for the creation of collaborative work environments that enhance knowledge activation in organizations.

As virtual teams constitute an important and pervasive organizational structure, research with the aim of improving the effectiveness of these teams is vital. Although critical topics such as conflict, coordination and trust are being addressed, research on creativity in virtual teams has been quite limited. Given that creative solutions to complex problems create and sustain a firm's competitive advantage, an investigation of creativity in virtual teams is warranted. The goal of the current study is to explore the influences on creativity in asynchronous virtual teams. Predicated upon grounded theory, this exploration is accomplished through an in-depth qualitative analysis of the team communication transcripts of ten virtual teams. Teams were composed of graduate students who interacted solely via an asynchronous, computer conferencing system to develop the high-level requirements and design for a new innovative product. Significant inhibitors to the creative performance of virtual teams included dominance, domain knowledge, downward norm setting, lack of shared understanding, time pressure, and technical difficulties. Significant enhancers to creativity included stimulating colleagues, the existence of a variety of social influences, a collaborative team climate, and both the surfacing and reduction of equivocality.

This special issue of the IEEE TRANSACTIONS ON PROFESSIONAL COMMUNICATION focuses on developing new case studies for use in technical and professional communication courses. The term “case study” used here refers to descriptions of real world events that illustrate particular communication problems through collections of primary documents and secondary materials. While case study pedagogy provides students with many benefits, such as concrete applications of technical communication theory, there are distinct challenges that may prevent instructors from developing case studies, such as collecting primary documents as they become available in the media. The case studies treated in the special issue focus on the following events: the crash of Air Midwest Flight 5481; the accounting scandals of the Enron corporation; the communication crisis at Brookhaven National Laboratory; the leaking of nuclear material at the Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Plant; the Texas A&M bonfire collapse; and airline press releases in the wake of the attack on the World Trade Center.

This case study describes an incident at Davis-Besse Nuclear Power Plant in Oak Harbor, Ohio, and discusses ways in which the case study can be used to examine ethical communication problems and as a basis for writing analytical reports that compare, justify, and analyze materials and issues in technical writing courses. It relates case elements and assignments to broader course and program objectives, poses sample instructional guidance, and offers examples of student performance. Suggested assessment methods to evaluate student learning are also given.

This case study describes classroom use of the decision making criteria contained in a recommendation report for corrective action following the 1999 bonfire accident at Texas A&M University, in which 12 students were killed and 27 were injured during a school-sanctioned activity. The instructional framework introduces criteria as a decision making tool, asks undergraduates to apply simple criteria in a hypothetical situation, outlines the TAMU case, and analyzes the TAMU report's criteria item by item. It also provides guidelines for assessing students' integration of criteria into their own recommendation reports. This case study offers an analytical model not often available to readers outside an organization and introduces undergraduates to a more sophisticated evaluative methodology than most have used in previous writing projects.

The events of September 11, 2001, provide enough case material for hundreds of cases that are applicable in Technical and Professional Communication courses. I developed the case described in this article to give students a real-world look at how corporations communicate in a crisis-in this case, a crisis of extraordinary proportions. The foundation for the case is the public communication via press releases from American Airlines and United Airlines via their press releases within the 24 hours following the first plane's crash into the World Trade Center. The activities provided allow students to produce appropriate corporate communication, in this case, press releases, using the details of the situation. They also provide a variety of ways to use crisis-response strategies, such as Coombs', to analyze, critique, compare and contrast how each airline constructed the messages it conveyed on this fateful day. This case study demonstrates how crucial each word of a message can be and allows students to reach concrete decisions about why a crisis-response plan, along with the accompanying crisis-response strategies and the resulting communication products are essential for any corporation.

This paper is an analysis of the challenges of dealing with the human and technical aspects of blended learning. It presents a case study of how one course has evolved over the years, presenting not only the lessons learned and the changes made at each stage, but the rationale for those changes. Looking at learning as the combination of information and interaction, the paper describes how the instructor went from being the Sage on the Stage to being the Sage in the Cage, to being the Guide on the Slide to finally being the Guide on the Side. It also documents how the course went from being technology driven to learner driven, and the evolution of an activity cycle. The paper ends with rationale for design changes and implications for current and future designs.

This paper describes a five-year research project aimed at developing a corpus-based language support tool able to respond to the English writing needs of Japanese software engineers who do not speak English natively. Our research was based on recent developments in corpus and text linguistics. Since foreign readers often complain that English text produced by Japanese authors is difficult to understand because it is poorly organized and incoherent, we focused on the possibility of designing a writing tool that would provide discourse-level as well as sentence-level assistance. We collected a total of 539 sample English abstracts from four well-known technical journals and tagged them with linguistic and rhetorical information. Using this tagged corpus, an initial prototype was developed on a Unix-based workstation and a second one on the Web. The Web-based prototype was then evaluated in terms of its usability by engineers in Ricoh's Software Research and Development Group. They evaluated the final product positively. However, they expressed uncertainty about its ability to address their weaknesses in using transition words effectively as cohesive devices. In spite of unexpected difficulties, product improvement continues.

Web-based training has been both acclaimed as a self-paced, consistent, stand-alone alternative to traditional instructor-led training and disparaged for its high development costs and dearth of qualified trainers. Critics especially question its effectiveness. This case study tests the effectiveness of a stand-alone Web-based training program and compares the results to that of an identical instructor-led course. The course provides highly task-oriented instruction for a computer software package and was developed using a proven instructional design methodology. The data from this study show that Web-based training is as effective as instructor-led training for stand-alone software application training in a corporation.

Web-based training has been both acclaimed as a self-paced, consistent, stand-alone alternative to traditional instructor-led training and disparaged for its high development costs and dearth of qualified trainers. Critics especially question its effectiveness. This case study tests the effectiveness of a stand-alone Web-based training program and compares the results to that of an identical instructor-led course. The course provides highly task-oriented instruction for a computer software package and was developed using a proven instructional design methodology. The data from this study show that Web-based training is as effective as instructor-led training for stand-alone software application training in a corporation.

Organizations are encountering novel external environments requiring flexible structures. A number of organizations have used virtual teams to provide the customer responsiveness, human resource flexibility, and speed in project completion these environments demand. Virtual teams create significant communication challenges for its leaders and members. This research analyzed the communication technologies that the Customer Support Virtual Team (CST) of International Consulting Systems (ICS), the pseudonym for a Fortune 500 organization, uses to support team interaction, the degree to which ICS systems and culture supported CST, and finally, the CST members' mindset toward communication and the methods its leader used to create the trust required for effective team interaction. Interviews revealed that ICS mission, strategy, tasks, reward systems, and attitudes toward technology supported virtual team structure. CST members were provided a suite of robust technologies to facilitate interaction; however, they relied heavily on voice mail and a large number of team, project, and organizational databases supported by Lotus Notes to generate a common language that facilitated task completion.

The aim of the study is to analyze the process of document design in a multilingual setting. In order to evaluate translation quality, a theoretical perspective is formulated as a basis for criteria for a good translation. In this perspective, the target text is considered an autonomous document. Two sets of criteria are distinguished: correctness errors and functional errors. The tools that were used to assess translation quality were expert analysis and reader focused evaluation. For both tools, a multilingual evaluation team was formed with the highest possible expertise in the target languages, in linguistics, and in usability. In this case study, the process of evaluation and the results are described.

The range of roles performed by technical communicators during the systems development process was identified and published from a 1997 survey of Australian technical communicators. Follow-up case study research investigated the development of 20 information systems. The research sought to quantify the technical communicator's contribution from the external viewpoint of developers and users. The paper describes the major findings from this research. The results support the 1997 survey findings that technical communicators do contribute positively to information systems development. The results quantitatively demonstrate that users are significantly more satisfied with computer systems where technical communicators are involved in the development process.

When newcomers join an organization, one of the most challenging tasks that they face is learning to write the way that particular organization recognizes as appropriate. Supervisors who review the writing produced by those newcomers are often expected to ensure that the documents meet organizational standards. This article, based on an ethnographic study of newcomers in two organizations, describes what newcomers need to learn in order to write appropriately and suggests resources and strategies that can help guide employees through the maze of organizational discourse conventions. Part II of this article will describe how newcomers learn and will provide further suggestions for facilitating learning about writing in the workplace.

For part I see ibid., June 1998. Part I focused on what newcomers need to learn in order to write appropriately on the job and suggested resources and strategies to help supervisors guide their new employees through the maze of organizational discourse conventions. This article, based on the same ethnographic study of newcomers in two organizations which provided the basis for Part I, will describe theories that explain how newcomers learn, show evidence of those theories in action, and provide further suggestions for facilitating learning about writing in the workplace.

Foreign engineers and scientists must publish their research in professional journals in English, but they often lack the proficiency and skills to do so successfully. The commentary describes a course that teaches these skills to Ph.D. students before they enter the job market. The techniques described are also effective tools for teaching professionals in the workplace.

Case study research can make important contributions to the field of professional communication if the research is carried out with rigor. The paper discusses inaccurate uses of the term "case study" and then presents ideas for conducting more rigorous case studies. Advantages and disadvantages are described, as well as typical techniques, such as interviews, logs, and visual and verbal protocols.

The World Wide Web has exploded as a means of corporate communications. The paper examines the technologies employed in using the Web, including software and hardware concerns, and the uses to which the organization can employ the technology. A case study of how the College of Journalism and Communications at the University of Florida developed and is using the Web provides additional illustration of the Web's potentials for internal and external communication. The paper concludes with a brief description of organizational and legal issues which have been spawned by use of the Web.

Despite increasing interest in collaborative writing in industry, little is known about the writing done in companies adopting team-based organizational designs. In such settings, teams organized to produce special documents may include members who do little or no writing for their regular jobs and thus lack experience in generating and selecting ideas, particularly in group settings. In the case study discussed here, the issue of authority provided a subtle but powerful undercurrent during the lifespan of one writing project. The collective and individual voices of team members indicated a constant tug between deep-seated expectations born of traditional systems of hierarchy in organizations and the new responsibilities of making contributions in team settings. Although environmental supports for authentic involvement seemed to be in place, those supports alone could not guarantee the sharing of authority.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Examines the communication problems that can arise in policy-making situations requiring public input and assent when the ethical and cultural assumptions of technical people representing a government entity differ from those of the citizen participants. Technical people often operate from an "ethic of expediency" that values clear, precise technical data as the basis for decision-making, but when citizen participants hold sharply different cultural values and interests, they may perceive such communication as privileging the interests of government over their own. Drawing on Habermas's (1979) concept of the "ideal speech situation", the authors present a case study in which engineers representing a city government attempted to gain the assent of a minority community to a well drilling project. The study suggests that the engineers' communication, although presented in good faith, did not meet Habermas's "claims to validity" and was thus seen by community residents as ideologically distorted. Because they did not trust the communication, the residents could not enter into consensus building, and the project remains at impasse. The engineers' propensity to frame the situation as a technical space for rational decision-making, from which cultural concerns and political motives could be excluded, made them blind to reality as the citizen participants perceived it. Government representatives in such situations have an ethical obligation to observe cultural difference and to create a communicative context in which consensus building is possible.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

American document design process models reflect the assumption that comprehension and usability are the most important characteristics of effective documents, but it is increasingly evident that other cultures value other communicative features of documents and that purposes and intentions vary across cultures. This case study examines the responses of four sets of American readers (three sets familiar with American document design research and practice and one set of content specialists-engineers by training) to the visual aspects of an annual report. The original document was prepared for a mid-sized Japanese corporation and published and distributed in Japan; the American version is an almost literal translation of the original document from Japanese to English, with no changes in visuals, graphic design or format. Protocol analyses of readers' responses revealed distinct patterns of expectations and preferences based on (1) cultural biases, (2) degree of familiarity with the American document design model, and (3) ignorance of Japanese culture and corporate communicative practices. This study raises questions about the effectiveness in terms of cultural sensitivity of what we have called the "American" document design process model and usability testing procedures, and calls for extensive collaborative research designed to describe and analyze current practice in international settings.

This case study explores how engineers at one consulting firm analyzed intended audiences using an array of analysis strategies. It finds that the engineers most often used these strategies intuitively and that their use of the strategies was influenced by values considered important in their organization's culture. This suggests that communicators can intentionally choose among an array of audience analysis strategies, and the choices of analysis strategy, information to include/exclude and style are influenced by the organizational culture in which the communicator works. This further suggests that professionals can analyze their intended audiences to determine whether the audience is likely to share the organization's assumptions and values upon which a communication is based.

The paper surveys studies of the process model for understanding writing, focusing in particular on problem-solving strategies in the writing process. It then presents a case study of the use of issue trees-a hierarchal network of goals not unlike the decision trees used in management science and artificial intelligence-to guide the writing process of the second author as he wrote a technical report. A good issue tree shows the relationships between various pieces of information: which information is central and which is supportive or incidental. Issue trees offer engineers a visual view of their writing plan. By building a hierarchal issue tree to illustrate the logical links of the proposed writing task, the engineer can put an overlay of "technology" on the task of writing-an overlay that may "trick" the unwilling writer into writing, and writing well.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

This study comparing Spanish and Danish negotiation styles suggests that culture-specific factors are critical in understanding multicultural communication. Although the two groups received identical training in negotiation styles, they retained key differences in terms of topic allocation, verbal immediacy and topic progression; the Spanish were substantially more people-oriented, whereas the Danish were substantially more task-oriented. These results suggest that the two groups of negotiators would view each other's negotiating styles critically because of the differences in their cultural styles.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

This paper presents a longitudinal case study of the introduction of voice mail, applying media richness theory to develop and assess a set of 16 tasks with varying levels of equivocality, and to compare different media. Through t-tests, reliability, factor, and multidimensional scaling analyses, evaluation of task equivocality and voice mail is discussed and potential shortcomings of current approaches are highlighted. Results show that equivocality does not seem to be unidimensional and includes aspects of authority across organizational boundaries. Across all tasks, telephone would be most likely selected by respondents, but face-to-face and telephone were more likely to be selected for more equivocal tasks. Unlike prior studies, voice mail is perceived as similar to documents and face-to-face.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Communication during tough economic times necessitates continuous response. A case study conducted over a six-month period that focuses on an internal communications process improvement (CPI) initiative called 'Toward Better Two-Way' that was carried out in a manufacturing division of a Fortune 100 company is presented. The initiative developed an active, two-way communication channel in a setting where exchanges between managers and employees had been infrequent and ineffective.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Professional educational philosophers C.A. Bowers and D.J. Flinders (1990) describe the classroom as an ecology comprising interrelated linguistic and cultural patterns that determine how information is communicated in the classroom. their classroom ecology model centers on the observation of three interconnected areas: the metaphors that the teacher and the textbook use to introduce students to the formal and informal curriculum, the manner in which the teacher frames student expertise and classroom relationships, and the nonverbal communication between teacher and students. Using Bowers and Flinders' model, a technical writing class taught by a teacher who emphasizes relationships, understanding and acceptance, and collaboration was studied. The teacher's metaphorical language, framing of instruction and student relationships, and nonverbal language are shown to reflect a rhetorical approach to technical writing, a caring approach to teaching, and a supportive, community environment for learning. This ethnographic study provides a snapshot of how one teacher defines technical writing and how he answers the question of how is should be taught.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Modern tools for sending the written word across distances have given communicators new ways to reach audiences within organizations and across organizational boundaries. The ways in which communicators must now rethink the sources of information available for their messages, the way they create messages, and the networks through which they distribute their messages are discussed. The steps that the US Department of Agriculture Forest Service went through when it created a unit to distribute information on public opinion to its managers in more than 900 field offices nationwide are outlined.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Electronic communication systems, such as a fiber-optic and telephone-delivered videotext service a videoconferencing capability, and a fax network, that have been used to improve the speed and quality of communication to 15000 employees dispersed throughout the state of Florida are described. The ways in which foreseeable changes in the state's demographics, the company's business environment, and emerging media technologies will interact to affect the evolution of the company's employee communication are described.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Despite forecasts of the increasing use of cross-functional project teams in industry, too little is known about how such teams function and how they might come to function more effectively. One organization, a small manufacturing firm in the Southeast, and members of a selected cross-functional project team consented to have a researcher present during the life cycle of a single project. Reflections based on the resulting case study highlight three overarching areas of concern in cross-functional designs: first, equity as an evolving blueprint for project-team work; secondly, trust as the foundation upon which solid progress depends; and thirdly, authority as the visible framework of the process and products of the team's work.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

Research in technical communication in 1989 is assessed. The analysis indicates that systematic research in technical communication is still in a limited stage of development. One major problem is the lack of a clear distinction between an illustrative case and a case study in the empirical sense. In the few articles presenting systematic research, the most frequently used methodology is survey/questionnaire. Problems include sample selection and generalizability. In several studies, however, surveys were just one of several tools in a qualitative approach. While some projects were carefully designed, overall, the quality of the methodology is uneven. A comparison of the areas being researched with those designated by technical communicators as needing research revealed that more research is needed in management. Also needed is more systematic research into visual aspects of technical communication.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

A study of the time needed for each step in the editing and publishing of research reports at one laboratory revealed 16 steps that could benefit from efforts to speed up the publication process. Strategies for improving publishing times were reviewed after 3 to 5 years. Strategies applied by the editorial staff members to their own in-house operations were usually successful, whereas strategies applied to the operations of outside publishers were not. It is suggested the tailoring of management strategies to address specific slow procedures is the key to timely publication. Tighter deadlines and the monitoring of manuscripts through each step of the publication process led to significant reductions in the time required for publication.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

The author suggests that those interested in creating or refining corporate communication policies should consider ethnographic analysis-observation, interviewing, and collecting situational data-to understand the complex web of meanings that make up organizational culture. She maintains that such an analysis can provide diagnoses of organizational policies and procedures as well as deeper understanding of communication behavior in organizations. As such, ethnographic analysis can promote beneficial change in policy issues.< <ETX xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">&gt;</ETX>

The author considers ethical issues involved in technical advertising by examining several documents produced by a major insurance company to promote and explain a health care plan. The documents (newspaper advertisement, followup brochure, and policy) are evaluated for truthfulness, according to general rhetorical criteria as well as legal and industry standards. The author concludes that technical writers are obliged to acquaint themselves with a variety of ethical principles governing advertising practices. To ensure that readers understand the truth, technical writers should also apply a variety of readability assessments and edit documents carefully to ensure that advertising and promotional literature are intertextually consistent with contracts, warranties, and policies.

The authors present a typical online information system and discuss the problems inherent in its use. The problems are addressed by a revised system which provides easier access to the database for both novice and experienced users. The system is illustrated by a scenario of a typical interaction with the revised system. The system used as an example is an online library catalog based on the SPIRES database management system.

User-testing of computer documentation is beginning to move into the laboratory. A properly conducted user test offers software producer much more information that cannot be obtained in any other manner. The author discusses the advantages and disadvantages of the previous ways of user testing such as testing in the marketplace, magazine reviews, and prerelease on-site testing (beta tests). In addition, a detailed case study of a laboratory-based usability test is presented.

This study was designed to assess the effects of delay in publication of information in medical journals. The case study concerned the natural history of an article that appeared recently in a medical journal. The particulars of this article from the time of its conception through its consecutive submission to, and rejection by, four major medical journals, and its eventual publication, instead, in a minor medical journal have been studied. The subject of the article was a new form of treatment for Amanita verna poisoning. The period of delay between clinical treatment and publication of the article was 21 months. During this period, however, information about this clinical case received general publicity through newspapers, magazine articles, radio, and telephone. These details then were considered in the context of the medical journal's traditional roler to communicate information that sometimes may be urgent. The effects of delays and breakdowns in the information system that links medical authors with medical readers by way of medical journals and the influence of other media on medical communication also have been considered. To remain effective as channels of communication in an information-conscious society, medical journals must reassess their traditional methods of transmitting information by becoming aware of faults in this specialized communication system and by ensuring that information that is primarily of medical interest does not, by default, have to be transmitted by other chanels.