Humanizing information retrieval: Organizing “works.” Sponsored by SIG CR

✍ Scribed by Richard P. Smiraglia; Allyson Carlyle; Edward T. O'Neill; Patrick LeBoeuf; Anita Coleman

• Publisher: Wiley (John Wiley & Sons)
• Year: 2005
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 130 KB
• Volume: 40
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0044-7870
• DOI: 10.1002/meet.1450400180

✦ Synopsis

Abstract

The purpose of this panel is to explore our understanding of the “work” entity and its role in information retrieval. In the past, works have been discussed in the context of bibliographic control, or more narrowly in the context of the library catalog. But as research into the nature of works has matured over the past decade or so, we have begun to broaden the basic definitions of the components of the work‐relationship, the better to view the problem of works from an information retrieval perspective.

A work, at a basic level, is a deliberately created knowledge‐record (i.e. a text, and oeuvre, etc.) representing a coordinated set of ideas (i.e., ideational content) that is conveyed with the purpose of being communicated to a consumer. A document may contain one or more works, and a work may exist on one or more documents.

Quite frequently, as it turns out, a given work exists in many instantiations, which means it appears on many different documents, which presents an interesting problem for information retrieval. Research into the nature of the work entity points to an evolving research front.