Emphasizes that the current closed or in-house systems approach to information retrieval needs to be expanded to include all the information systems available, and that the sources of user satisfaction and retrieval success must be tracked before changes can be made in certain system components. Ten references are listed. (FM)

Various models that have been devised to evaluate the performance of information retrieval systems are reviewed. Such models fall into three categories: (1) evaluation from the viewpoint of the user, who is primarily concerned with how well the system responds to his query; (2) evaluation from the system operator's standpoint, which focuses on the…