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In the beginning of the 1990s it was decided to start educating journalists at two Danish universities. This was decided in the hope that such academic journalists would carry greater insight into that work. Therefore for the curricula of these students of journalism some traditional academic disciplines were introduced. One such academic discipline was information retrieval. It was clear, however, that the information retrieval course had to be designed specifically for the students of journalism, as the information needs of journalists differ from the information needs of more traditional academic disciplines. Thus, this article describes the work done in order to develop such a course for students of journalism. Firstly, it analyses the information needs of journalists on a theoretical basis. Secondly, an empirical study analyses which information retrieval resources are available to Danish journalists. Finally, it combines the theoretical and the empirical findings in arguing that it is necessary to provide students of journalism with a theoretical understanding of how online information retrieval works, and also practical experience with several information retrieval resources that they are supposed to use in their daily work.

The contrast between the value placed on discriminatory power in discussions of indexing and classification and on the transformation of a query into a set of relevant records dominant in information retrieval research has not yet been fully explored. The value of delivering relevant records in response to a query has been assumed by information retrieval research paradigms otherwise differentiated (the cognitive and the physical). Subsidiary concepts and measures (relevance and precision and recall) have been increasingly subjected to critiques. The founding assumption of the value of delivering relevant records now needs to be questioned. An enhanced capacity for informed choice is advocated as an alternative principle for system evaluation and design. This broadly corresponds to: the exploratory capability discussed in recent information retrieval research; the value of discriminatory power in classification and indexing; Giambattista Vico‘s critique of the unproductivity of Aristotelian methods of categorisation as routes to new knowledge; and, most significantly, to ordinary discourse conceptions of the value of information retrieval systems. The criterion of enhanced choice has a liberating effect, restoring man as an artificer and enabling a continuing dialectic between theory and practice. Techniques developed in classic information retrieval research can be adapted to the new purpose. Finally, the substitution of the principle of enhanced choice exemplifies the development of a true science, in which previous paradigms are absorbed into new as special cases. Ay, in the catalogue ye go for men; As hounds, and greyhounds, mongrels, spaniels, curs, Shoughs, water‐rugs, and demi‐wolves, are clept All by the name of dogs: the valu’d file Distinguishes the swift, the slow, the subtle, The housekeeper, the hunter, every one According to the gift which bounteous Nature Hath in him clos’d; whereby he does receive Particular addition, from the bill That writes them all alike; Shakespeare. Macbeth. c.1606.

The purpose of this paper is to characterize library and information science (LIS) as fragmenting discipline both historically and by applying Whitley’s (1984) theory about the organization of sciences and Fuchs’ (1993) theory about scientific change.

The study combines historical source analysis with conceptual and theoretical analysis for characterizing LIS. An attempt is made to empirically validate the distinction between LIS context, L&I services and information seeking as fragmented adhocracies and information retrieval and scientific communication (scientometrics) as technologically integrated bureaucracies.

The origin of fragmentation in LIS due the contributions of other disciplines can be traced in the 1960s and 1970s for solving the problems produced by the growth of scientific literature. Computer science and business established academic programs and started research relevant to LIS community focusing on information retrieval and bibliometrics. This has led to differing research interests between LIS and other disciplines concerning research topics and methods. LIS has been characterized as fragmented adhocracy as a whole, but we make a distinction between research topics LIS context, L&I services and information seeking as fragmented adhocracies and information retrieval and scientific communication (scientometrics) as technologically integrated bureaucracies.

The paper provides an elaborated historical perspective on the fragmentation of LIS in the pressure of other disciplines. It also characterizes LIS as discipline in a fresh way by applying Whitley’s (1984) theory.

The possibility of having access to all the world's literature from a single computer terminal stimulated the imagination of the research workers in the late' sixties. It was this goal and the fascination of the co‐operation between man and machine, that inspired the major changes that have taken place in Information Retrieval over the past ten years.

The following bibliography focuses mainly on programs which can run on IBM microcomputers and compatibles under the operating system PC DOS/MS DOS, and which can be used in online information and documentation work. They fall into the following categories:

This review reports on the current state and the potential of tools and systems designed to aid online searching, referred to here as online searching aids. Intermediary mechanisms are examined in terms of the two stage model, i.e. end‐user, intermediary, ‘raw database’, and different forms of user — system interaction are discussed. The evolution of the terminology of online searching aids is presented with special emphasis on the expert/non‐expert division. Terms defined include gateways, front‐end systems, intermediary systems and post‐processing. The alternative configurations that such systems can have and the approaches to the design of the user interface are discussed. The review then analyses the functions of online searching aids, i.e. logon procedures, access to hosts, help features, search formulation, query reformulation, database selection, uploading, downloading and post‐processing. Costs are then briefly examined. The review concludes by looking at future trends following recent developments in computer science and elsewhere. Distributed expert based information systems (debis), the standard generalised mark‐up language (SGML), the client‐server model, object‐orientation and parallel processing are expected to influence, if they have not done so already, the design and implementation of future online searching aids.

A grid information retrieval model has benefits for sharing resources and processing mass information, but cannot handle conceptual heterogeneity without integration of semantic information. The purpose of this research is to propose a concept‐based retrieval mechanism to catch the user's query intentions in a grid environment. This research re‐ranks documents over distributed data sources and evaluates performance based on the user judgment and processing time.

This research uses the ontology lookup service to build the concept set in the ontology and captures the user's query intentions as a means of query expansion for searching. The Globus toolkit is used to implement the grid service. The modification of the collection retrieval inference (CORI) algorithm is used for re‐ranking documents over distributed data sources.

The experiments demonstrate that this proposed approach successfully describes the user's query intentions evaluated by user judgment. For processing time, building a grid information retrieval model is a suitable strategy for the ontology‐based retrieval model.

Most current semantic grid models focus on construction of the semantic grid, and do not consider re‐ranking search results from distributed data sources. The significance of evaluation from the user's viewpoint is also ignored. This research proposes a method that captures the user's query intentions and re‐ranks documents in a grid based on the CORI algorithm. This proposed ontology‐based retrieval mechanism calculates the global relevance score of all documents in a grid and displays those documents with higher relevance to users.

This article reviews the state of the art in automatic indexing, that is, automatic techniques for analysing and characterising documents, for manipulating their descriptions in searching, and for generating the index language used for these purposes. It concentrates on the literature from 1968 to 1973. Section I defines the topic and its context. Sections II and III consider work in syntax and semantics respectively in detail. Section IV comments on ‘indirect’ indexing. Section V briefly surveys operating mechanized systems. In Section VI major experiments in automatic indexing are reviewed, and Section VII attempts an overall conclusion on the current state of automatic indexing techniques.

The main objective of this article is to show the increasing relevance of the knowledge production capability of information storage and retrieval systems in the context of ‘perpetual innovation’, otherwise known as the ‘information’ economy. The knowledge production potential of information retrieval systems is only barely recognised in the information science community. Traditionally, information professionals and retrieval systems devised by them are conceived merely as guardians and facilitators of knowledge. This prevents information professionals playing a key role in an innovation based economy. In a perpetual innovation economy, information/knowledge embedded in commodities becomes the main source of profit. However, the peculiar character of information/knowledge means that privately owned knowledge tends to flow back into the public domain. This peculiarity necessitates continuous production of new knowledge applied to products and production techniques. Creative acts are not individualistic but collective/collaborative processes. Emerging collaborative systems on computer networks, such as the Internet, make it possible to devise work environments that are conducive to the development and cultivation of collective practices. Informational retrieval systems designers and practitioners may find it useful to study such systems to develop retrieval mechanisms that enhance creativity and facilitate knowledge production as well as knowledge transfer. It is hoped that by putting information retrieval in the context of the perpetual innovation economy, the knowledge production potential of information retrieval systems becomes more widely acknowledged and accepted among information practitioners.

The development of a given discipline in science and technology often depends on the availability of theories capable of describing the processes which control the field and of modelling the interactions between these processes. The absence of an accepted theory of information retrieval has been blamed for the relative disorder and the lack of technical advances in the area. The main mathematical approaches to information retrieval are examined in this study, including both algebraic and probabilistic models, and the difficulties which impede the formalization of information retrieval processes are described. A number of developments are covered where new theoretical understandings have directly led to the improvement of retrieval techniques and operations.