Extending retrieval strategies to networked environments: Old ways, new ways, and a critical look at WAIS
✍ Scribed by Marchionini, Gary ;Barlow, Diane ;Hill, Linda
- Publisher
- John Wiley and Sons
- Year
- 1994
- Tongue
- English
- Weight
- 460 KB
- Volume
- 45
- Category
- Article
- ISSN
- 0002-8231
No coin nor oath required. For personal study only.
✦ Synopsis
Information retrieval has become a popular topic in business and government due to the development of high-speed networking and finding aids such as Gopher, World-Wide-Web, Mosaic, and WAIS (e.g., Obraczka, Danzig, & Li, 1993). Such systems have provided broad ranges of computer users generally easy access to Internet resources, but access is not sufficient to assure information-seeking success. There is no evidence on how such systems perform either quantitatively or qualitatively, and no guidance on what information-seeking strategies are appropriate. Although the IR community agrees that networked resources are important research and development domains, there have been no systematic studies of retrieval performance in networked environments. Practice rather than theory is driving development. This situation is problematic since networked enduser environments have enormous implications for IR researchers and information specialists. To explore how one such system performs, a comparative investigation was conducted for the WAIS system and a Booleanbased retrieval system. This brief communication reports preliminary results from this study and makes suggestions for developers, evaluators, and users.
WAIS is the name of a suite of programs using the client/server architecture and based on the NISO 239.50 information retrieval protocol (Kahle & Medlar, 199 1). This protocol allows searchers using a variety of interface "clients" to formulate queries which are translated into appropriate formats for particular "servers" that contain the bibliographic or primary information. A WAIS client