Information retrieval design: Principles and options for information description, organization, display, and access in information retrieval databases, digital libraries, catalogs, and indexes

✍ Scribed by Ryen W. White

• Publisher: John Wiley and Sons
• Year: 2006
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 191 KB
• Volume: 57
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 1532-2882
• DOI: 10.1002/asi.20403

✦ Synopsis

Information Retrieval Design is a textbook that aims to foster the intelligent user-centered design of databases for Information Retrieval (IR). The book outlines a comprehensive set of 20 factors, chosen based on prior research and the authors' experiences, that need to be considered during the design process. The authors provide designers with information on those factors to help optimize decision making. The book does not cover user-needs assessment, implementation of IR databases, or retrieval systems, testing, or evaluation.

Most textbooks in IR do not offer a substantive walkthrough of the design factors that need to be considered when developing IR databases. Instead, they focus on issues such as the implementation of data structures, the explanation of search algorithms, and the role of human-machine interaction in the search process. The book touches on all three, but its focus is on designing databases that can be searched effectively, not the tools to search them. This is an important distinction; despite its title, this book does not describe how to build retrieval systems. Professor Anderson utilizes his wealth of experience in cataloging and classification to bring a unique perspective on IR database design that may be useful for novices, for developers seeking to make sense of the design process, and for students as a text to supplement classroom tuition.

The foreword and preface, by Jessica Milstead and James Anderson, respectively, are engaging and worthwhile reading. It is astounding that it has taken some 20 years for anyone to continue the work of Milstead and write as extensively as Anderson does about such an important issue as IR database design. The remainder of the book is divided into two parts: Introduction and Background Issues and Design Decisions.

Part 1 is a reasonable introduction and includes a glossary of the terminology that authors use in the book. It is very helpful to have these definitions early on, but the subject descriptors in the right margin are distracting and do not serve their purpose as access points to the text. The terminology is useful to have, as the authors' definitions of concepts do not fit exactly with what is traditionally accepted in IR. For example, they use the term "message" to refer to what would normally be called "document" or "information object," and do not do a good job at distinguishing between "messages" and "documentary units."

Part 2 describes components and attributes of IR databases to help designers make design choices. The book provides them with information about the potential ramifications of their decisions and advocates a user-oriented approach to making them. Chapters are arranged in a seemingly sensible order based around these factors, and the authors remind us of the importance of integrating them. The authors are skilled at selecting the important factors in the development of seemingly complex entities, such as IR databases; however, the integration of these factors, or the interaction between them, is not handled as well as perhaps should be. Factors are presented in the order in which the authors feel they should be addressed, but there is Book Review