Innovation in Information Retrieval: Perspectives for Theory and Practice

Citation

Bates, J. (2013), "Innovation in Information Retrieval: Perspectives for Theory and Practice", Journal of Documentation, Vol. 69 No. 2, pp. 320-321. https://doi.org/10.1108/00220411311300101

This is an edited collection comprising of an introduction and seven self‐contained chapters, each covering a different aspect of contemporary information retrieval (IR). Each chapter stands alone and includes a conclusion and extensive references at the end of the chapter, and the book is well indexed, as one would expect. Each chapter provides a valuable insight and expert view on an area within the broad IR topic. While the scope of the book is certainly diverse, what it does is give the reader an excellent overview of research and future directions in the field of IR.

Although this book is aimed predominantly at postgraduate students with an interest in information retrieval, and specifically those undertaking dissertations at Master's or PhD level, it certainly has wider appeal and relevance for LIS students, academics, researchers, and those involved in the design of IR systems.

Bawden begins by taking the reader on an interesting journey looking at the development of creative information systems that reflect the full gamut of information behaviours and support browsing and serendipitous information discovery. The chapter on classification (Slavic) is a useful primer and moves from a fairly introductory level to address more complex concepts and functions. While providing an historical overview of the development of classification systems, the chapter also considers classification in subject gateways on the web, and academic repositories. Classification and retrieval of fiction are explored in a chapter by Vernitski and Rafferty. Different methodological approaches are considered, and issues relating to user tagging are briefly mentioned in the conclusion of the chapter. While the reader may want a more detailed discussion of social tagging and fiction, there is subsequently a whole chapter given over to folksonomies.

The remaining chapters focus on music retrieval; folksonomies and tagging; semantic navigation; and web search engines. In the chapter on music information retrieval research Inskip provides the reader with an understanding of MIR systems, developments to date, and challenges for the future. The chapter on folksonomies, social tagging and IR (Peters) is essential reading for everyone who is interested in how folksonomies facilitate IR and “folksonomy‐based recommender systems”. Kopac, Freund and O'Brien explore research into semantic navigation and digital information interaction and focus on the need for active engagement with digital information and the digital environment, which goes beyond the retrieval of specific information items, and how search systems might respond to this need (indeed this chapter complements the opening chapter by Bawden). In the final chapter Mike Thelwall, who has published extensively on the subject, discusses how web search engines can be evaluated using webometric approaches.

While each chapter has its own conclusion, one minor criticism is that it could have been useful if there was a final overall conclusion drawing together the different threads that run throughout the book. The strengths of this book are the wide‐ranging subject matter and topics covered. Each chapter is well written, thought‐provoking, and intelligent, and overall the book provides the reader with a genuine and comprehensive understanding and knowledge of the current, and near future, world of IR practice and research. The Editors, Foster and Rafferty, have done a good job in ensuring overall consistency and readability. The book lends itself to being read sequentially or readers can select individual chapters. Hopefully the book will stimulate both further research in this area and research‐based practice in terms of the design of information retrieval systems and approaches to IR.