This two-part dissertation centers on a re-examination of the role of book indexes in information retrieval research on full-text digital book collections in digital libraries. Early research focused on information retrieval and book indexes (in addition to other parts of books) in the 2000s when the Google Books corpus was first released to the…

The inverted index is the main data structure used by all the major search engines. Search engines build an inverted index on their collection to speed up query processing. As the size of the web grows, the length of the inverted list structures, which can easily grow to hundreds of MBs or even GBs for common terms (roughly linear in the size of…