Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
and Vickery 1985, 114). For the purposes of discussion here, they can be
considered as a single heterogeneous paradigm, linked but not united by
this common assumption. The value placed on query transformation is
dissonant with common practice, where users may prefer to explore an
area and may value fully informed exploration. Some dissenting research
discussions have been more congruent with practice, advocating explora-
tory capability—the ability to explore and make discriminations between
representations of objects—as the fundamental design principle for infor-
mation retrieval systems.
We can acknowledge the utility of techniques developed for selection
and ordering of references and documents—in both the experimental tra-
dition and commercial practice—and simultaneously recognize that these
techniques are derived from known fundamental computational opera-
tions. The techniques have been realized in the special-purpose tools and
machines used for information retrieval at the beginning of the research
tradition in the 1950s and by the programmed universal information
machine of the modern computer. We can fully acknowledge technology
rather than repress it and still make a distinction between techniques and
values in order to preserve and carry forward what may be valuable from
information retrieval research in information and computer science.
Librarianship and Indexing
Compared with the research tradition developed in information science
and subsequently diffused to computer science, the historical antecedents
for understanding information retrieval in librarianship and indexing are
far longer but less widely influential today. They have tended to be less
explicit about their evaluative criteria and aims for information retrieval
systems, and far less concerned with producing measures of effective-
ness. In contrast to information and computer science, they have been
associated with the technologies of writing and printing and have had
a pronounced preference for direct human description of information
objects. Although less immediately pronounced, we can discern a similar
pattern of repression regarding technology. The need for descriptions less
extensive than the documents described, imposed by storage constraints
of inscribed media, and for direct human intervention in the creation of
these descriptions, connected with the technical characteristics of writing
Search WWH ::




Custom Search