Effectively the eighth edition of Aslib's flagship Handbook of Special Librarianship and Information Work, the definitive reference source on information theory, practice, and procedure since 1957.

Information Retrieval (IR) is concerned with the effective and efficient retrieval of information based on its semantic content. The central problem in IR is the quest to find the set of relevant documents, among a large collection containing the information sought, satisfying a user's information need usually expressed in a natural language query. Documents may be objects or items in any medium: text, image, audio, or indeed a mixture of all three. This book presents 12 revised lectures given at the Third European Summer School in Information Retrieval, ESSIR 2000, held at the Villa Monastero, Varenna, Italy, in September 2000. The first part of the book is devoted to the foundation of IR and related areas; the second part on advanced topics addresses various current issues, from usability aspects to Web searching and browsing.

An information retrieval (IR) system is designed to analyse, process and store sources of information and retrieve those that match a particular user's requirements. A bewildering range of techniques is now available to the information professional attempting to successfully retrieve information. It is recognized that today's information professionals need to concentrate their efforts on learning the techniques of computerized IR. However, it is this book's contention that it also benefits them to learn the theory, techniques and tools that constitute the traditional approaches to the organization and processing of information. In fact much of this knowledge may still be applicable in the storage and retrieval of electronic information in digital library environments. The fully revised third edition of this highly regarded textbook has been thoroughly updated to incorporate major changes in this rapidly expanding field since the second edition in 2004, and a complete new chapter on citation indexing has been added. Unique in its scope, the book covers the whole spectrum of information storage and retrieval, including: users of IR and IR options; database technology; bibliographic formats; cataloguing and metadata; subject analysis and representation; automatic indexing and file organization; vocabulary control; abstracts and indexing; searching and retrieval; user-centred models of IR and user interfaces; evaluation of IR systems and evaluation experiments; online and CD-ROM IR; multimedia IR; hypertext and mark-up languages; web IR; intelligent IR; natural language processing and its applications in IR; citation analysis and IR; IR in digital libraries; and trends in IR research. Illustrated with many examples and comprehensively referenced for an international audience, this is an indispensable textbook for students of library and information studies. It is also an invaluable aid for information practitioners wishing to brush up on their skills and keep up to date with the latest techniques.

Limiting the scope of the study to currently operating artificial intelligence (AI) systems, Lancaster (library and information science, U. of Illinois) and Warner (Thesaurus Design Specialist, Argus Associates, Inc.) offer advice on what AI services can be applied to library and information services and speculate on what may become applicable in the near future. Among the applications discussed are cataloging, subject indexing, reference services, intelligent text processing, data mining, help desks, critiquing systems, speech technology, and computer vision. c. Book News Inc.

CoLIS 5 was the ?fth in the series of international conferences whose general aim is to provide a broad forum for critically exploring and analyzing research inareassuchascomputerscience,informationscienceandlibraryscience.CoLIS examinesthehistorical,theoretical,empiricalandtechnicalissuesrelatingtoour understanding and use of information, promoting an interdisciplinary approach to research. CoLIS seeks to provide a broad platform for the examination of context as it relates to our theoretical, empirical and technical development of information-centered disciplines. The theme for CoLIS 5 was the nature, impact and role of context within information-centered research. Context is a complex, dynamic and multi- - mensional concept that in?uences both humans and machines: how they behave individually and how they interact with each other. In CoLIS 5 we took an interdisciplinary approach to the issue of context to help us understand and the theoretical approaches to modelling and understanding context, incorporate contextual reasoning within technology, and develop a shared framework for promoting the exploration of context.