Review of 'Innovations in Information Retrieval: Perspectives for Theory and Practice'

Edited by Allen Foster and Pauline Rafferty
2011, London: Facet, 224pp, £44.95,
ISBN 978-1-85604-697-8

When I recently told a fellow librarian I was reviewing a book on information retrieval (IR) she denied that the concept had any relevance to librarianship any more – it’s now (allegedly) all about the fuzzier and friendlier ‘resource discovery’. IR has always been a particular interest of computer-science departments, but this book argues, against my colleague, for its continued wider relevance and validity.

Behind the catch-all title lies a deep vein of historical analysis and a wide range of perspectives on IR in practice. David Bawden asks what happens to browsability and serendipity when most information-seeking acts take place online. Aida Slavic gives an up-to-the-minute report from the overlapping borders of semantics, linked data and classification. Three chapters deal respectively with the retrieval of music information, fiction, and the usefulness of social tagging. The final two chapters investigate searchers’ interaction with information objects, and search engines through the lens of webometrics (i.e. the quantitative aspects of the Web).

There are gems here but there are also obsolete data (studies of AltaVista and HotBot tell us nothing about how Google works today), careless mistakes (a reference to “Julie” Kristeva), irrelevancies (we are told that Yahoo! China has “particularly good coverage of China”), and text that could benefit from greater editorial invention. The extensive research being carried out by the Goliaths of the internet is entirely absent, though Microsoft and Google have large research divisions. But the book makes the case for IR being an expansive area of study, and the academy-centred magpie approach is ideally suited to its defined target audience – master’s-level students in ILS wanting information and inspiration. The volume, in different ways, offers both.

Colin Higgins, Librarian, St Catharine's College Cambridge

Presentations from ISKO UK meeting "Agenda for Information Retrieval"

The Agenda for Information Retrieval event was organized in conjuction with the School of Library Archives and Information Studies at UCL, and was attended by 91 participants.

Three eminent speakers: Brian Vickery, Stephen Robertson and Ian Rowlands, addressed issues that have been on the information retrieval agenda from the 1950s to the era of Google. The talks were followed by a lively and stimulating discussion chaired by Stella Dextre-Clarke.

We are grateful to Conrad Taylor, co-ordinator of the BCS KIDMM (Knowledge, Information, Data and Metadata Management) community, for recording and photographing the event.

Presentations and recordings of the talks are now available at the event's page.

Findability - survey's shock findings

AIIM (the Association for Information and Image Management) have just completed a survey on Findability to be published soon (see their press release).

The 'shock' finding is that among more than 500 businesses surveyed, "69% of respondents report that less than half of enterprise information is searchable online".

Dan Keldsen is Director of Market Intelligence at AIIM, and his blog offers an interesting discussion of these preliminary results.

We had similar findings reported back in March by Cap Gemini in their Information Opportunities Report.

How many more of these reports do we have to suffer before people realize that actively organizing knowledge and information is the only way to ensure findability? Add your weight to the argument by submitting a comment to Dan's blog, arguing the case for knowledge organization in your organization, or by commenting on this post.

Or, preferably, all three!

ISKO UK Event, London, 26 June - Agenda for Information Retrieval

We would like to invite you to an open meeting of the British Chapter of International Society for Knowledge Organization (ISKO UK) entitled

"Agenda for Information Retrieval" in London,

26th June 2008 15:00 - 19:00 (registration starts 14:30).

Venue: University College London, Engineering Faculty, Roberts Building G06

Cost: 10 GBP (ISKO UK members free)

Searching, browsing, and other routes to information are no longer the preserve of information professionals; they are on every desktop, at the fingertips of almost anybody. “Search” has become part of the everyday lifestyle.

Three eminent speakers Brian Vickery, Stephen Robertson and Ian Rowlands will address the issues that have dominated the information retrieval agenda since the 1950s, and still present challenges and opportunities for the future.
This ISKO UK event is organized in cooperation with UCL's School of Library, Archive and Information Studies (SLAIS).

For full details on the venue, programme and to book your place at the event visit http://www.iskouk.org/AgendaIR_June2008.htm


SPEAKERS AND TOPICS

Brian Vickery will take a look back at the development of information retrieval, and some of the problems it has faced. A chemist at the start of his career, Brian Vickery has had enormous influence on knowledge organization since 1952, as one of the founder members of the Classification Research Group. He served also at the (then) National Lending Library in Boston Spa, the University of Manchester Institute of Science and Technology, and from 1966 to 1973 as Research Director of Aslib. This post was followed by ten years as Director of the School of Library, Archive and Information Studies at University College London. Despite his formal retirement in 1983, Brian has continued working actively in the information field ever since.


For the last ten years Stephen Robertson has been a researcher at the Microsoft Research Laboratory. He previously spent twenty years at City University, where he started the Centre for Interactive Systems Research and still retains a part-time professorship. His work on probabilistic theory underpins the algorithms behind every serious search engine today. But for this talk, he will give a non-technical overview of some current concerns of core IR research, in particular on the use of different kinds of evidence in searching and ranking. He is a Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge; he won the Tony Kent Strix Award in 1998 and the Gerard Salton Award in 2000.

Ian Rowlands will ensure we see the issues from the all-important perspective of the user. He is the author of the recently published report on searching behaviour of the ‘Google generation', commissioned by JISC and the British Library. Ian is Senior Lecturer at SLAIS, UCL, and a member of its CIBER research group. He was formerly at City University from 1993, leading the MSc Information Science course, and before joining City worked for Pira International, a contract research organisation . His teaching interests are in scholarly communication, journal publishing, bibliometrics and research methods.

Presentations and audio recordings - Meta Knowledge Mash-up 2007

The BCS "Knowledge, information, data and metadata management" (BCS-KIDMM) project - organized a one-day conference on 17 September 2007 entitled "Meta Knowledge Mash-up 2007: Putting information back into IT".

A Mash-up for knowledge: From an origin in Jamaican creole and the music industry, ‘mash-up’ has come to mean putting together data from different sources to produce a useful new resource. The aim of our event is to tear through the boundaries between different professional specialisms, and ‘mash-up’ the perspectives we carry from our own practice, to create something for the benefit of all.

Slideshows and audio recordings can be found at the Mash-up outputs page

Talks:

• Conrad Taylor (Electronic Publishing SG) "Introduction to the day, plus: An overview of methods of adding ‘handles and labels’ to data, information and knowledge products"
  
• Tony Rose (Infomation Retrieval SG) "Information Retrieval today: an overview of issues and methods"
  
• Tom Khazaba (SPSS) "Data Mining, Text Mining and the Predictive Enterprise"
  
• Ian Herbert (Health Informatics Forum) "Interoperability of health information, and the role of controlled vocabularies"
  
• Dan Rickman (Geospatial SG) "Geospatial information and its applications"
  
• Christopher Marsden (Victoria & Albert Museum) "The V&A’s Core Systems Integration project: Using a common data model to unify museum catalogue databases"
  
• Terry Freedman (The National Archive) "Digital preservation – what are the issues?"
  
• Leonard Will (Will Power) "Overview on subject indexing classification and thesauri"
  
• Richard Millwood (Core UK) "Enabling knowledge communities"
  

Invasion of the Knowledge Organizers

London, England, 22 August 2007.

The authorities in London have issued a warning that the city is likely to be hit by several swarms of Knowledge Organizers next month. The first swarm will make landfall on 4 September, when the UK Chapter of ISKO hold their half-day seminar Tools for knowledge organization today.

Disorganized knowledge workers are advised to take extra care on 12 September, when mixed swarms of knowledge managers and data managers are forecast to hit the Charing Cross area. First to arrive will be those attending the afternoon seminar of NetIKX - the Network for Information and Knowledge Exchange - at the DWP in John Adam St., where Stella Dextre Clarke will be speaking on Standardising the language of information and knowledge management – the Agony and the Ecstasy.

Following in the early evening of the 12th., another swarm is expected to descend upon the British Computer Society's premises in Southampton Street for a meeting entitled Information, data and metadata: why they need to be managed. The meeting marks the launch of Keith Gordon's new book Principles of Data Management: Facilitating Information Sharing.

After a brief respite, we are warned that a further swarm is due to hit the Covent Garden area on 17 September in the form of the BCS KIDMM (Knowledge, Information, Data and Metadata Management) day conference KIDMM: MetaKnowledge Mash-up 2007. Since this gathering comprises a number of different species which do not normally swarm together, visitors to the area are advised to be on their guard against unpredictable behaviour.

So, make sure you get these in your diary:

04 September: Tools for knowledge organization today
12 September: Standardising the language of information and knowledge management – the Agony and the Ecstasy
12 September: Information, data and metadata: why they need to be managed
17 September: KIDMM: MetaKnowledge Mash-up 2007

New Developments in Faceted Search

Earley & Associates are running another TaxoCop Call on August 29 entitled New Developments in Faceted Search. Details are available on the Earley web site.

ISKO UK inaugural meeting of the British Chapter

In the discussion among members which arose from Alan Gilchrist's talk "If it rained knowledge..." at our inaugural meeting I was struck by the fact that research work on user behaviour on the internet - on exactly how they set about retrieving information - is thin on the ground. Some guidelines on a research project on user behaviour are urgently required.
In wondering where these guidelines might come from I thought of all the practical experience that librarians in public libraries have of user behaviour on the freely available internet pc's. Internet users in public libraries come from all types of background and some formal attempt to record their enquiry patterns would be quite possible. How to do it is the issue.

New KO-related books from Chandos

For anyone who has not seen the latest catalogue from Chandos Publishing, it contains a number of books relevant to our field. Some are new (and even yet-to-be-published) and some have been out for a while.

Not least is the eagerly-awaited book by Patrick Lambe, "Organizing Knowledge: Taxonomies, knowledge and organizational effectiveness" (ISBN 1-84334-227-8).

Others include:

• Information Architecture for Information Professionals. Dr. Susan Batley.
• Knowledge, Information and the Business Process. Liz Taylor.
• Challenges of Knowledge Sharing in Practice: A Social Approach. Gunilla Widen-Wulff.
• E-Journal Invasion: A Cataloger's Guide to Survival. Helen Heinrich.
• Theory and Practice of the Dewey Decimal Classification System. Dr. M. P. Satija.
• Indexing: From Thesauri to the Semantic Web. Pierre de Keyser.
• Metadata for Digital Resources: Implementation, systems design and interoperability. Muriel Foulonneau & Jenn Riley.
• Descriptive and Subject Cataloguing: A Workbook. Dr. Jaya Raju.
• Classification in Theory and Practice. Dr. Susan Batley.

Further details available on the Chandos Web site via an author search.

Bob

Conference announcement: Semantic Image Retrieval, 26-27 March, Brighton

Semantic Image Retrieval - the User Perspective, Brighton 26-27 March 2007.
The conference brings together members of the practitioner and research communities in image retrieval. A number of leading members of both communities will be giving presentations, and the programme features a keynote address by Corinne Jörgensen, a world authority on theory and practice in image retrieval.