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SIMPR (Structured Information Management: Processing and Retrieval) is an ESPRIT II Project aiming to achieve technological advances in information management This new technology is instantiated in the SIMPR software system. SIMPR will process documents by indexing them and classifying their subjects, before storing them in an electronic information base from which they can then be retrieved using simple natural language search requests. Building this system has required initiatives in automatic indexing, in language analysis, in subject classification and in machine learning. These initiatives are discussed in this paper, in the context of the strategy and achievements to date of the SIMPR Project.

The ESPRIT Project SIMPR developed software to analyse documents and generate indexes for them. Of immediate application as a document indexing and classification system, this also offers a technology for information modelling that has broader implications, supporting many new uses for information management software. The Project was based on the assumption that information can only be managed successfully by computer systems that can view the information contained in a document through the language in which the document is written, and that systems need to be sufficiently flexible to respond to the changing requirements of document use.

This article reviews some of the more unconventional text retrieval systems, emphasising those which have been commercialised. These sophisticated systems improve on conventional retrieval by using either innovative software or hardware to increase retrieval speed or functionality, precision or recall. The software systems reviewed are: AIDA, CLARIT, Metamorph, SIMPR, STATUS/IQ, TCS, TINA and TOPIC. The hardware systems reviewed are: CAFS‐ISP, the Connection Machine, GESCAN,HSTS,MPP, TEXTRACT, TRW‐FDF and URSA.

Current approaches to text retrieval based on indexing by words or index terms and on retrieving by specifying a Boolean combination of keywords are well known, as are their limitations. Statistical approaches to retrieval, as exemplified in commercial products like STATUS/IQ and Personal Librarian, are slightly better but still have their own weaknesses. Approaches to the indexing and retrieval of text based on techniques of automatic natural language processing (NLP) may soon start to realise their undoubted potential in terms of improving the quality and effectiveness of information retrieval. In this article we will explore what that potential is. We will divide information retrieval functionality into conceptual and traditional information retrieval and we will examine some of the current attempts at using various NLP techniques in both the indexing and retrieval operations.

The purpose of this paper is to present a brief outline of the potential applications of intelligent agent technology in libraries with a list of illustrative examples.

A definition and the attributes of intelligent agents are presented, along with different types of agents and their wide‐ranging applications in various contexts. Illustrative examples of intelligent agents are presented, with some interesting case studies from different domains.

The role of intelligent agents in modern libraries is highlighted from various perspectives, such as electronic information services, collection development and acquisition, classification and organization of library materials, indexing and abstracting, issuing collection, and reference services.

The authors do not attempt to devise an intelligent agent to test these applications in the libraries where they work, although they wish to pursue it as a future course of action.

With libraries dealing with patrons who never disclose fully their information needs and research interests to library staff, libraries have to resort to newer methods of feedback collection, and intelligent agents provide viable options to improve information organization and refine library services.

The paper, being very precise and covering the latest developments, offers new insight into the field of intelligent agents and their pragmatic applications in libraries to interested professionals.

The objective of the paper is to amalgamate theories of text retrieval from various research traditions into a cognitive theory for information retrieval interaction. Set in a cognitive framework, the paper outlines the concept of polyrepresentation applied to both the user's cognitive space and the information space of IR systems. The concept seeks to represent the current user's information need, problem state, and domain work task or interest in a structure of causality. Further, it implies that we should apply different methods of representation and a variety of IR techniques of different cognitive and functional origin simultaneously to each semantic full‐text entity in the information space. The cognitive differences imply that by applying cognitive overlaps of information objects, originating from different interpretations of such objects through time and by type, the degree of uncertainty inherent in IR is decreased. Polyrepresentation and the use of cognitive overlaps are associated with, but not identical to, data fusion in IR. By explicitly incorporating all the cognitive structures participating in the interactive communication processes during IR, the cognitive theory provides a comprehensive view of these processes. It encompasses the ad hoc theories of text retrieval and IR techniques hitherto developed in mainstream retrieval research. It has elements in common with van Rijsbergen and Lalmas' logical uncertainty theory and may be regarded as compatible with that conception of IR. Epistemologically speaking, the theory views IR interaction as processes of cognition, potentially occurring in all the information processing components of IR, that may be applied, in particular, to the user in a situational context. The theory draws upon basic empirical results from information seeking investigations in the operational online environment, and from mainstream IR research on partial matching techniques and relevance feedback. By viewing users, source systems, intermediary mechanisms and information in a global context, the cognitive perspective attempts a comprehensive understanding of essential IR phenomena and concepts, such as the nature of information needs, cognitive inconsistency and retrieval overlaps, logical uncertainty, the concept of ‘document’, relevance measures and experimental settings. An inescapable consequence of this approach is to rely more on sociological and psychological investigative methods when evaluating systems and to view relevance in IR as situational, relative, partial, differentiated and non‐linear. The lack of consistency among authors, indexers, evaluators or users is of an identical cognitive nature. It is unavoidable, and indeed favourable to IR. In particular, for full‐text retrieval, alternative semantic entities, including Salton et al.'s ‘passage retrieval’, are proposed to replace the traditional document record as the basic retrieval entity. These empirically observed phenomena of inconsistency and of semantic entities and values associated with data interpretation support strongly a cognitive approach to IR and the logical use of polyrepresentation, cognitive overlaps, and both data fusion and data diffusion.

In selecting the contributions to this special issue, the editors have tried to plot a course that describes the state of the AI field for both the reader unacquainted with AI and for those who are. We have done this by selecting key research papers in the areas of AI that are impacting and will continue to impact libraries and by including sidebars that give context to the research papers. The language of the research papers is not simplified; AI is not a simple field. But neither is it incomprehensible, so if parts of this special issue are found to be difficult, the reader is advised to concentrate on the overall ideas rather than their specific expression.

There is a huge amount of information and data stored in publicly available online databases that consist of large text files accessed by Boolean search techniques. It is widely held that less use is made of these databases than could or should be the case, and that one reason for this is that potential users find it difficult to identify which databases to search, to use the various command languages of the hosts and to construct the Boolean search statements required. This reasoning has stimulated a considerable amount of exploration and development work on the construction of search interfaces, to aid the inexperienced user to gain effective access to these databases. The aim of our paper is to review aspects of the design of such interfaces: to indicate the requirements that must be met if maximum aid is to be offered to the inexperienced searcher; to spell out the knowledge that must be incorporated in an interface if such aid is to be given; to describe some of the solutions that have been implemented in experimental and operational interfaces; and to discuss some of the problems encountered. The paper closes with an extensive bibliography of references relevant to online search aids, going well beyond the items explicitly mentioned in the text. An index to software appears after the bibliography at the end of the paper.

An autoethnographic account is given in order to depict the building of the author's musical subjectivity through the specific modes of cross-generational and peer-to-peer interaction involving material and emotional investments, discursive constraints, and transgressions. The event of discovering the “sound of silence” is brought in contrast to the more encoded experiences of classical music, especially operatic. Emotionally charged musical events and rituals are revisited (narrated) together with accounts of transgressing the boundaries of inherited musical environments and learned patterns of musical appreciation.

Over the last few decades, technological development has had a major impact on libraries. Nowadays many libraries use electronic support for operations such as acquiring and cataloguing material, searching, and retrieval. Information technology is an aid for both the librarian, in order to organise the material, and for the user in order to gain access to the broad storehouse. Information is still physically stored in the library. This represents an intermediate step in the process of library automation which leads to a completely electronic library, where a timely provision of selected materials to individuals, when and where they need them, is guaranteed. An electronic library houses different kinds of electronic information: in addition to text, there is an extensive use of multimedia collections, such as sound archives, video material, slide collections and so on. The electronic library is the result of complex changes which have affected and which still affect the publishing world (Barker 1994; Clement 1994; Raitt 1993).