Designed to provide students of information science with an introduction to British librarian Samuel Clement Bradford's 1934 findings about the scattering of information, this reader on Bradford's Law begins by discussing its use in calculating search procedures in printed bibliographies as well as in databases. The following additional materials…

Discusses artificial intelligence (AI) and considers four potential roles for AI in information retrieval (IR): (1) information characterization, i.e., building a knowledge base; (2) information seeking, i.e., search formulation; (3) support functions, including abstracting; and (4) systems integration. Three examples are given that show how AI…

Indexing and abstraction services in the social sciences are growing as primary sources. Results are that users become overwhelmed with the number of secondary services they use. Therefore, planning, coverage and overlap are examined in this research report with emphasis on reexamining secondary services and redefining users and users' needs.…

This set of papers offers insights into some of the major developments in the field of classification and knowledge organization, and highlights many of the fundamental changes in views and theories which have taken place during the last 40 years. This document begins with a series of reminiscences from former delegates of the first International…

The report deals with experiments in testing and evaluation of an information retrieval system within the Comparative Systems Laboratory (CSL). Section I outlines the approach and the general methodology developed in CSL, the operational design of the experiments, the construction and use of the manuals, and the general significance of the…

This chapter describes how ERIC addresses the problems resulting from four conditions that make it unique in the indexing field: (1) its subject area includes a wide range of subspecialists; (2) its clientele is extremely diverse; (3) it has a dual retrieval purpose--for both manual and computer access; and (4) its retrieval is challenged by the…

The purpose of this project was to provide guidance to ERIC on how to facilitate product information retrieval. Information on practitioner needs, on the use of descriptors and abstracting procedures, and on alternatives for improving the system was gathered and circulated to NIE staff members. The resulting document described three alternative…