Interactive Information Seeking, Behaviour and Retrieval

Citation

Žumer, M. (2012), "Interactive Information Seeking, Behaviour and Retrieval", Program: electronic library and information systems, Vol. 46 No. 2, pp. 277-278. https://doi.org/10.1108/00330331211221882

This books offers an overview of the recent advances in all aspects of information retrieval, focusing particularly on information seeking and information behaviour, thus “bridging the gap between human‐ and system‐oriented viewpoints addressing the same problems”. Significant improvement of information retrieval systems can be expected from better understanding of human information behaviour and this book systematically presents the relevant “issues, problems and advances”.

The book is composed of 13 independent chapters, written by different authors. Some are critical reviews, others describe original research. The first chapter, “Interactive information retrieval: history and background” (by Cool and Belkin) presents the historical overview of information retrieval developments and describes the split between computer science and information science in the area of information retrieval systems.

In Chapter 2, “Information behaviour and seeking”, Peiling Wang describes the important studies, models and theories of human information behaviour and concludes with the discussion of relevance, which remains a central concept in information retrieval.

Chapter 3, “Task‐based information searching and retrieval” by Elaine G. Toms, is an overview of a particular approach to user interaction with information retrieval systems: user tasks.

In Chapter 4, “Approaches to investigating information interaction and behaviour”, Raya Fidel analyses the major approaches to the study of information behaviour and discusses the strengths and weaknesses of different methods used.

“Information representation” by Mark D. Smucker is Chapter 5. Surprisingly, this is not about metadata, but rather about subject analysis and subject access. This is a very important topic, but unfortunately this chapter is rather superficial, there are even some rather problematic parts. The description of different types of catalogues is vague and there are even some erroneous claims, such as “it is well established that precision and recall are inversely related”. The second part of the chapter, though, is a good description of automatic indexing and some of the techniques: tokenisation, stemming, stop word removal, weighting.

Eddie Rasmussen, in Chapter 6 “Access models”, describes and explains the basic models that have been used in information retrieval systems: Boolean model, vector space, probabilistic and linguistic models. She also introduces relevance feedback.

Chapter 7, “Evaluation” by Kalervo Järvelin, deals with the broad area of information retrieval system evaluation. Three types of evaluation approaches are discussed: test‐collection‐based, user‐centred and operational.

In Chapter 8, “Interfaces for information retrieval”, Wilson gives an overview of different types of interfaces – from simple Google interface to different visualisation techniques. Chapter 9, “Interactive techniques” by White, continues focusing on useful interactive support tools: supporting search activities, indicating relevance, query creation support, decision support.

Web searching is discussed by Teevan and Dumais in Chapter 10. The web presents specific challenges owing to its size and heterogeneity. The authors describe approaches to ranking, interaction with search results, personalisation and they conclude with emerging trends.

“Recommendation, collaboration and social search” by Nichols and Twidale is Chapter 11. They discuss the design of information retrieval systems based on social elements such as user recommendations, annotation, implicit and explicit ranking.

The final two chapters, 12 (Liu, Little and Rüger) and 13 (Little, Brown and Rüger), both deal with multimedia. Information retrieval systems increasingly include non‐textual objects such as images, video and sound. The first part focuses on user behaviour and design of interfaces to support interaction, while the second part describes representation of multimedia objects to support searching, particularly content‐based retrieval.

This book provides interesting reading and will be particularly used by educators teaching information retrieval. The text is aimed at senior undergraduate and masters' levels students in both library and information science and computer science and has the potential of bringing together the two communities. In addition to a general overview and historical perspective many novel topics are introduced. The level of treatment differs from a review and list of references to in‐depth discussion, but each chapter provides a well rounded discussion. The book can be used as a whole, alternatively, only individual chapters may be read. Particularly readers of individual chapters would appreciate references following each chapter instead of the single lengthy reference list at the end of the book.

Chapter 5 is the weakest and does not address appropriately the very important topic of subject analysis and user subject access. I would expect a discussion of controlled vocabularies vs. automatic indexing and different mechanisms, which could support query formulation. In addition, there is no chapter on data representation (metadata schemes and formats) – except for multimedia. Multilingual issues, essential in the globalised environment, are not addressed either.

This said – most chapters provide descriptions of latest developments and state‐of‐the‐art. The focus on the user (and not the system) is encouraging. The students as designers and developers of the future systems will build their expertise from a sound foundation.

In summary: this is a very interesting book both for educators and students and will definitely also be appreciated by practitioners dealing with information retrieval systems.