Search results

This paper surveys theoretical and practical issues associated with a particular type of information retrieval problem, namely that where the information need is pictorial. The paper is contextualised by the notion of a visually stimulated society, in which the ease of record creation and transmission in the visual medium is contrasted with the difficulty of gaining effective subject access to the world's stores of such records. The technological developments which, in casting the visual image in electronic form, have contributed so significantly to its availability are reviewed briefly, as a prelude to the main thrust of the paper. Concentrating on still and moving pictorial forms of the visual image, the paper dwells on issues related to the subject indexing of pictorial material and discusses four models of pictorial information retrieval corresponding with permutations of the verbal and visual modes for the representation of picture content and of information need.

Having gently (I hope) reprimanded Charles Oppenheim (everyone knows Charles) about his cavalier attitude to Information Theory (Cawkell 1990), I received a letter from him saying “I watch television but have no understanding of how it works. What's more I do not need to have such knowledge in order to make better use of it”.

At the 1978 Aslib conference, I gave a talk entitled ‘The New Technology’, subsequently summarised in a short article in this journal. In it a drawing of something I called the ‘Consumersole’ appeared. This device, which was discussed in an article also published in 1978, was a prediction of what might be used in homes and businesses at the end of the century.

It was convenient to talk about standards for modems when that topic was discussed in Part 2 of this series. Unfortunately modem standards are only a small fraction of the standards needed if a universal telecommunications system is to become a reality—particularly if machines on which ‘Terminal Services’ are running are to easily communicate with each other (fig.1).

Books include novels, dictionaries, telephone books, textbooks, anthologies, instruction manuals, proceedings of meetings and directories. The phrase “electronic books” has been applied to some types of CD‐ROM systems, palm‐top CD players, on‐demand text, electronic document systems of various kinds ± in fact to almost any kind of computer‐based text system that needs hyping up for marketing purposes. The future prospects for the electronic book are examined in this article.

Viewdata was a British invention. The inventor, Sam Fedida, came to work at the Post Office research centre in 1970, on a “viewphone” project. Apart from providing television pictures of the caller and recipient involved in a telephone conversation, the viewphone was also to allow transmission of computer data. Such a piece of equipment would, it was hoped, increase telephone network use during off‐peak periods.

It's hard to resist the temptation to produce once again my rather poor attempt at copying Tenniel's sketch from ‘Through The Looking Glass’. The quotation from the book accompanying the sketch shown in Figure 1, is Humpty‐Dumpty's immortal comment on the Indexing Problem.

This review covers those aspects of communications which are relatively new and will probably have a continuing impact for at least two years — although this forecast, like nearly all other forecasts, is likely to be mostly wrong. A small amount of essential basic material is included — such as the section entitled ‘The bandwidth/speed imperative’, So much effort is being devoted to this subject, particularly in the case of POTS ( Plain Old Telephone System) improvements, that a few words about it seems to be in order.

Image processing technologies are offering considerable potential for library and information units to extend their databases by the inclusion of images such as photographs, paintings, monograph title‐pages and maps. Discusses problems and potential solutions in a structured fashion, based on categories of thesauri (text and visual), hybrids, description language and automatic content analysis, with state‐of‐the‐art examples.

Nostradamus, a Frenchman who died in 1566, made his reputation through his prophetic but enigmatic book Centuries. He had the wit to make the book so obscure that it is impossible to say whether there are the slightest grounds for his prophetic reputation. He was appointed as physician to Charles IX, but we do not know whether his medical reputation was any better than his prophecies.