The meaning of the term information retrieval can be very broad. Looking up a telephone number, whether online or in a book, is a type of information retrieval. Later on, consulting the slip of paper in your pocket on which you’ve written the number, is a type of information retrieval. Millions of people engage in information retrieval every day when they use a Web search engine or search their email. As a field of study, Information Retrieval (IR) is most commonly defined as the process of extracting unstructured information that has been digitally stored in databases (Bourne & Hahn, 2003; Manning, Raghavan, & Schütze, 2007). The information could be data, text, sound, or images. Information professionals are trained in IR as part of their education. Before information became digitized, IR involved the skilled use of printed indexes, concordances, catalogs, and knowledge of reference resources. The skills needed to locate and access information today have changed since the pre-digital days. What hasn’t changed is the mission of the information professional: to connect people with the information they need and want.
References
Bourne, C.P., & Hahn, T. B. (2003). A history of online information services, 1963-1976. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.
Manning, C.D., Raghavan, P., & Schütze, H. (2007). Introduction to information retrieval. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Purpose
This blog will focus on how information professionals retrieve information. I am particularly interested in investigating how traditional information retrieval techniques can be applied to the challenges posed by the Internet and the World Wide Web. This will be a learning experience that I invite you to share with me.
Introduction
Retrieving information is a key area of library and information science. Librarians and other information professionals have long been experts in knowing where to find the best information and how to access it. Our skills include understanding how information is stored in various systems, how it is searched, evaluated, and how people use it. Effective information search and retrieval is interrelated with the organization and description of the stored information.
Information professionals today have a vast array of resources at their command as they connect people with information. On this blog I will discuss some of those resources from the viewpoint of a professional looking for information, as well as highlight some interesting issues and trends.
Information professionals today have a vast array of resources at their command as they connect people with information. On this blog I will discuss some of those resources from the viewpoint of a professional looking for information, as well as highlight some interesting issues and trends.
About Me: Carol Winfield
My passion is making information accessible.
I began my career as a graphic designer many years ago, then migrated into Web design, then Web site management, and now I am in Knowledge Management. As a graphic artist, I considered design to be all about the presentation of information to facilitate understanding. As a knowledge worker, I now spend my days with taxonomies and metadata for the same purpose.
I began my career as a graphic designer many years ago, then migrated into Web design, then Web site management, and now I am in Knowledge Management. As a graphic artist, I considered design to be all about the presentation of information to facilitate understanding. As a knowledge worker, I now spend my days with taxonomies and metadata for the same purpose.
Blog Archive
My classmates in Information Science in Librarianship are blogging on related topics:
- An Archive of Archiving
- Archiving in Information Sciences
- Collecting Information
- Describing Information: In a Nutshell
- Disseminating Library Knowledge
- How Do Information Scientist Create Information?
- How Information Professionals Organize Information
- Human Brain Squeeze
- Info-Nation
- Information Dissemination... connecting people to information
- Information Organization
- Information Professionals that Create Information
- Information Science & the Creation of Information
- Library Preservation
- On Descript
- Retrieving Information
- Storing Information
- The History and Future of Information Preservation
- The Preservation of Information
- What's In A Name
Select Information Retrieval Resources
Overview & History
Articles and Abstracts
Books Online
Bibliography
Blogs
Conference
Gateway
Journals
- International Journal on Semantic Web and Information Systems
- The Journal of Web Librarianship
- The Journal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology (JASIST)
- IEEE Annals of the History of Computing
Organizations
- ACM SIGIR
- American Society for Information Science and Technology (ASIST)
- Library and Information Technology Association (LITA)
- Special Libraries Association
TOPICS
Boolean Logic
Information Overload
Search
Standards
5 comments:
Great observation. I never thought that virtually everything I do is information retrieval. How simple, yet how complicated!
Yes, the skills needed to find information today have changed a lot if you are talking about technology methods and the vast availability of resources. At the same time there are some things about information retrieval that are still the same. You still need to be able to come up with the right search terms whether you are searching the index of a print book or searching a database or ‘goggling’. But you are right about “the need for information professionals to teach users how to find, evaluate, and effectively use the information”. Probably this is truer today than in the past because of the perception by many that if you can find it on the web then it must be true.
Great post, and nice citations! It is such a broad topic and encompasses so much. I look forward to learning more about the methods used to teach these skills.
Good observations. Information retrieval has really benefited from advances in technology, as have all the other steps in the information cycle. The one area that technology really can't improve on is the act of imbibing information. You will never convince me that reading from a computer screen is as good as reading a book. But that is the obvious conclusion and goal of many techno-philes. We don't need books, and we can have a paperless office or library! That is a future I don't look forward to.
That is so true how anything that we do can be considered information retrieval. And I agree that this is a topic that can be considered very broad.
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