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When I received your Honorary Secretary's invitation to speak at this conference I was naturally very flattered—because nobody had ever asked me to speak at a library conference before—and the choice of subject suited me, since it has been my concern over the last seven years of my professional career and since I was already about to prepare a contribution to another work on much the same topic. So I accepted the invitation with eagerness. But that was several months ago, and in the interim I have been getting progressively more uneasy. The other assignment I mentioned—a survey of the last five years' production in library science literature for our new reference work BLIS—had been completed, not without a struggle, and far from thinking afterwards that I could incorporate the same material into this talk, I was led further into doubt about what I should say, doubt about why I was being asked here at all, and what my qualifications were for saying anything at all to anyone. I thought back over the conferences I had attended as an all‐too‐silent observer these last seven years and asked myself what common characteristic the speakers had that I could now lay a claim to. They seemed, many of them, to be full‐time research workers, or recipients of grants, people with a lot of ideas about the future of the profession, library school lecturers, educationists with a discerning or a patronizing interest in libraries, political figures dragooned into giving their set speeches to, for a change, library audiences, and quite simply, people talking about their day‐to‐day work. Only the last category was open to me, and you will be pleased to hear that I do not intend to talk about my work at the Library Association, except incidentally.

It is now some twenty years since the activity which has come to be known as information science had its discernible origin as one of the so‐called new interdisciplinary fields that emerged in the post‐war proliferation of scientific activity. This scientific revolution which also produced such new fields as operations research, game theory, systems engineering, cybernetics and so forth can for the most part be traced to the war itself in that they were attempts to develop general methods for dealing with problem areas, the likes of which were encountered during the conduct of the war. The origins of information science, for example, can be directly traced to the war during which the efficient and knowledgeable handling of masses of information was necessary. Because these tasks were generally assigned to undermanned staffs, it was natural for people to believe that the solution to problems relating to information processing lay in the supply of necessary manpower to carry out a sequence of clerical tasks. With the immediate post‐war proliferation of scientific publications which in no small degree resulted from the demonstration of the value of science in the war and hence the ensuing formation of new areas of activity, it was no wonder that scientists began to feel that (1) an information explosion was taking place and (2) critical communication problems were arising in the scientific community due to this information explosion.

It is indeed a pleasure to talk to you this evening about information retrieval in general and at the Center for Documentation in particular. Information retrieval, I suspect, is treated with some suspicion in Britain, and much of the outpouring of documentation literature is doubtless discounted as typical American excesses of enthusiasm and braggadocio. I hope that I can contribute something tonight towards putting our own efforts into a sensible perspective.

The nature and conceptualization of public space and public life have been always associated with collective participation and socialization – in other words, the capacity to live together among strangers. Today these associations seem to have become challenged and problematic, and often end in questioning whether public space still matters for our public life? This paper aims to bring new understanding to the reading of public life in public spaces and also contribute to rethinking of the role of urban design today within our changing public life.

The paper adopts participant‐observation within a case‐study area, “Parque das Nações”, in Lisbon, Portugal.

The paper identifies a number of spatial, social and experiential conditions that are conducive to social interactions amongst strangers. Often it is the combination of three factors that generates the most interaction.

Participant observation is a useful method to study public behaviour in the public realm. Nevertheless, as the study was conducted in one location, the findings may not be transferable to other locations/cultures, etc.

This paper demonstrates the need to rethink and adapt urban design practices to an increasing changing public life. Urban design needs to be much more sensitive to all locations (planned and unplanned) and the favourable spatial, experiential and social conditions people make use of and which can provoke positive interactions need to be recognised.

A better understanding of the factors that are conducive to positive interaction between strangers and non‐strangers in the public realm will help to develop more favourable conditions for these to take place. The interaction between people is part of the fabric of social life.

This is the first paper to combine social/spatial and experiential factors in the observation of social interaction in public places.

All items listed may be borrowed from the Aslib Library, except those marked, which may be consulted in the Library.

In many information systems, intervening relevance assessments are an accepted operational practice; i.e. documents identified by the system as responses to a question are assessed as either relevant or non‐relevant, and only those judged relevant are forwarded to the user (questioner). It is commonly assumed that subject experts can perform such intervening relevance assessments with a high degree of accuracy. However, much of the literature on relevance indicates the relevance‐assessment process to be highly subjective, and hence a task that should be performed only by the user.

All items listed may be borrowed from the Aslib Library, except those marked, which may be consulted in the Library.

All items listed may be borrowed from the Aslib Library, except those marked *, which may be consulted in the Library.

All items listed may be borrowed from the Aslib Library, except those marked *, which may be consulted in the Library.

All items listed may be borrowed from the Aslib Library, except those marked *, which may be consulted in the Library.