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6023 results in Facet Publishing

Page 271 of 302

  • 3 - Types of library service and library

  • from Part 1 - Libraries and information services: evolution or revolution?
  • G. G. Chowdhury, Paul F. Burton, David McMenemy, Alan Poulter
  • Book:
    Librarianship
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    20 December 2007, pp 25-34

  • Summary

    Introduction

    This chapter outlines the generic services that libraries offer and the internal processes they need to run in order to offer those services. Academic (including university) libraries and public libraries are examined in more detail, and special libraries, essentially libraries attached to organizations or to political entities, are introduced. Special libraries include national libraries. Institutions that perform roles related to that of libraries are also covered.

    Library services

    User services provide users with the value that they expect from libraries:

  • 1 Information services: lending books and other materials as sources of information, maintaining institutional and community information listings, conserving and digitizing organizational and local heritage collections, and setting up and running websites and intranets supporting the host organization, the local community or even local government services.

  • 2 Learning services: fostering reader development; offering information literacy or user education programmes, homework clubs and family learning programmes; developing lifelong learning in the community by means of basic literacy and numeracy initiatives, ICT skills training, and the provision of a wide range of networked learning resources, some of which may be library-produced.

  • 3 Advice services: offering personal guidance on obtaining services or rights. This might involve areas such as health, careers, social security/pensions, housing, consumer rights or family matters. Advice can be seen as general information tailored to an individual need. It may involve referral (e.g. to another agency) or an action (e.g. help in completing a form). Advice might be delivered by an expert or by someone who has had the same need.

  • 4 Leisure services: lending books or other materials for leisure reading/consumption. These materials are chiefly fiction, but leisure reading can also encompass many types of non-fiction: cookery books, do-it-yourself manuals, history, biography and so on. Such materials can be consulted within the library, for example by offering drop-in access to read newspapers and magazines. Leisure does not involve just reading: libraries can maintain listings of local clubs and events, where like-minded individuals can meet and exchange knowledge. Finally, the library can offer itself as a venue for meetings of interest-based user or community groups.

    • Internal functions are performed by the library to maintain its user services, outlined above:

  • 1 Acquisitions: a library needs to acquire stock, or access to remote resources, which involves selection, ordering and receiving.

  • 22 - Core management skills

  • from Part 6 - Management and marketing in libraries
  • G. G. Chowdhury, Paul F. Burton, David McMenemy, Alan Poulter
  • Book:
    Librarianship
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    20 December 2007, pp 239-250

  • Summary

    Introduction

    This chapter will discuss some of the core management skills that are important for effective practice as a librarian. New entrants to the library profession should have an understanding of these basic skills and be able to translate the theory into practice in their organizations. The topics to be discussed are financial management, performance measurement, management of change, and the motivation and management of staff.

    Financial management

    One of the primary tasks that managers in any organization have is that of looking after budgets. Accountability for spending decisions can be a major responsibility, whatever the size of your budget: the basic principles underlying fiscal probity remain consistent, regardless of budget size. Remember that as a librarian making financial decisions, you are purchasing materials on behalf of your library and your users, and this means you must be accountable for all spending decisions you make.

    The key to successful financial management is an understanding of how budgeting works within your organization. This is as simple as knowing how the financial year of your organization works; for example, in the UK, public libraries normally run a financial year from April to March, while universities run their financial year from August to July. You are far more likely to have more money to spend on resources at the beginning of the financial year than at the end, so understanding your organization's financial year will make planning for purchasing much more straightforward. This is especially the case if you need to make large purchases, such as of expensive pieces of equipment, or expensive subscriptions to databases.

    How is your library funded?

    A fundamental question for any manager is how the service he or she is managing is funded. There are several ways of allocating funds to departments within organizations, and these will be discussed below.

    Top slicing

    Working in an organization that uses top slicing for budgeting can be challenging. Top slicing essentially means that when the organization is allocating budgets to departments, it does so on the basis that essential services are allocated monies before non-essential services. For example, the university where the authors of this text work uses a top-slicing mechanism which means that registration services, administration, and library and information services and so on are funded before allocation is given to faculties.

  • 7 - Library services

  • from Part 2 - Library and information resources and services
  • G. G. Chowdhury, Paul F. Burton, David McMenemy, Alan Poulter
  • Book:
    Librarianship
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    20 December 2007, pp 55-64

  • Summary

    Introduction

    This chapter discusses in more detail the types of library services provided within the different library sectors that currently operate. It is true to say that there are some functions that operate across sectors: these will be discussed generically first, before considering the unique aspects of the sectoral libraries, such as public, national, school and special libraries.

    Circulation and lending

    Circulation and lending are functions that operate across many sectors. Books and other resources can be borrowed from public libraries, school libraries, academic libraries and special libraries such as workplace libraries. The basic starting point for all libraries that operate this function is that of providing a service to a specific user community. This is a very important point, as no library exists to allow people to walk in, take a book and walk out without ascertaining whether the borrower has privileges or not, even in the most open of library sectors, public libraries.

    The function of a circulation and lending library is to ensure books are appropriately catalogued, classified and processed, making them available for the user community the library serves. The key emphasis here is on circulation, since the librarian desires books not to simply sit on the shelves but to be put to good use by borrowers.

    Circulation control, whereby the librarian has an efficient means of knowing which items are borrowed, by whom and for how long, is very important. This knowledge becomes management information that can inform library decision-making, since from these statistics the librarian can ascertain any subject areas that seem especially popular, and as importantly identify areas of stock that are not popular and that may need weeding. This can be done by the automated library management system (LMS) which will be discussed in its wider context in Part 5, Library Technologies. In terms of circulation and lending the LMS must record very specific aspects of information:

  • • Who is the borrower?

  • • What are the borrower's privileges? (i.e. how many books can they borrow, do they have overdues or requests in?)

  • • Does the book have previous requests to be satisfied?

  • • Are there any restrictions on the book being lent to this specific borrower on the basis of age or user group?

  • • What is the lending period for the book?

  • 1 - Introduction

  • G. G. Chowdhury, Paul F. Burton, David McMenemy, Alan Poulter
  • Book:
    Librarianship
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    20 December 2007, pp 1-12

  • Summary

    This chapter provides an introduction to librarianship by defining the term and then providing a quick history of the development of libraries. It then briefly discusses the philosophy of librarianship, and lists the various technological developments that have influenced libraries and library and information services over the past. Finally an outline of the book is provided, with an indication of the various topics covered. By the end of this chapter, the reader should have an understanding of the concepts of the library and librarianship and the principles governing the subject and the profession.

    Libraries

    In the strict sense of the term, a library is a collection of materials organized for use (Feather and Sturges, 1997, 254). However, this is a very narrow definition of the term, and does not reflect the major characteristics of a library. The usage of the word in English, which derives from the Latin word ‘liber’, meaning book, has been traced back to 1374 by the Oxford English Dictionary (1989), which quotes Chaucer as discussing a ‘lybrarye aparayled and wrowht with yuory and with glas’. This was in the context of a private library owned by a gentleman, therefore not the publicly accessible institution we all know today. In terms of a public building that was defined as such, the OED quotes the use of the term c.1449 in relation to the library of a religious institution, and 1530 in terms of a library available in the ‘Gyldehall’ in London. These libraries were ‘public’ in terms of not being the library of an individual person, but they were not so in terms of the concept of the free, communal library we would identify with today, which came to prominence with the public library movement of the 1840s.

    Various other definitions of the word library exist. In the most common usage of the term, a library denotes a physical space, a building, with shelves and so on, containing a number of books and other reading materials that have been organized for easy access and use. However, ‘library as a place of reading’ is not a complete definition of the term either, because it omits the various other activities that take place within a library, as well as the roles played by a library in human life and society in general.

  • 4 - Library design

  • from Part 1 - Libraries and information services: evolution or revolution?
  • G. G. Chowdhury, Paul F. Burton, David McMenemy, Alan Poulter
  • Book:
    Librarianship
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    20 December 2007, pp 35-40

  • Summary

    Introduction

    Libraries are housed in a wide variety of purpose-built or converted buildings. Growing book collections in the Renaissance were accommodated in an ad hoc manner but it gradually became apparent that purpose-built accommodation would be better. One of the earliest purpose-built libraries was the Laurentian Library in Florence, designed by Michelangelo and completed in 1571. From then on, purpose-built library buildings became a ‘production’ to be decided by the interaction of librarian, architect and site. The ideal library building does not yet exist, and probably never will. Learning from past mistakes and triumphs is the lesson for the future.

    Librarians need to appreciate library design even if they were not involved in the design of their library. A knowledge of library design gives a librarian an appreciation of how the services provided by a library might fit into its physical dimensions. Thus, while the physical structure of a building might be difficult (or impossible) to change, the way services and so on are laid out internally can be changed, albeit sometimes only at great cost. The physical ‘presence’ of a library has great importance for its users.

    General library design considerations

    Since libraries are all so different both in terms of their service provision and in general physical constraints (e.g. the size and location of their building plot), it is impossible to clone a design: ‘Fundamentally a library is not a building but a service organization’ (American Library Association, 1966).

    The first and most important consideration is to follow standards. The website Designing Libraries (www.designinglibraries.org.uk) is an excellent place to start on viewing what has been learnt. Martin (1993) and Thompson (1996) are also useful starting points into library standards. Yet, ironically, standards always exist to be broken!

    The essential issue is to consider and delineate as precisely as possible the functions of the library to be built, i.e. perform a needs assessment. This aims to understand what it is that users want in terms of services and resources, and also where and when and in what form they want them. Access should be encouraged in terms of lighting and passageways and the general level of comfort provided by the library and its environs.

  • 23 - Missions, planning, projects and partnerships

  • from Part 6 - Management and marketing in libraries
  • G. G. Chowdhury, Paul F. Burton, David McMenemy, Alan Poulter
  • Book:
    Librarianship
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    20 December 2007, pp 251-262

  • Summary

    Introduction

    The focus of this chapter will be on strategic planning and the policies that influence organizations. The majority of libraries form part of larger organizations, whether they are schools, public library networks, colleges, or companies and corporations. The librarian must understand where the service fits into the larger organizational objectives, and how policies that are developed both internally and externally will impact on service delivery. Crucially, librarians must also be open to influencing policy, both as individuals and as part of a profession.

    Therefore on completion of this chapter readers should be familiar with:

  • • the strategic planning process

  • • the increasing importance of project-led delivery of services and the management of it

  • • the importance of developing partnerships.

    • The strategic planning process

    While all the core management topics discussed above are vital to note, strategic planning is a crucial advanced step in your understanding of management skills. Strategic planning is about ensuring not merely that the library service is managed in the present, but that the library manager is forward-thinking and attempts to plan months and years into the future. As Johnson suggests, ‘Strategic planning is essential to guarantee a future library service for clients’ (Johnson, 1994, 7).

    Formulating a mission

    The aims and objectives of an organization are often encapsulated in a mission statement. Mission statements are documents that attempt to clearly state these aims and objectives for users, staff and other stakeholders. It is common to find mission statements displayed prominently within an organization: for instance, many libraries have statements displayed at entrances, and increasingly they are also appearing on library websites.

    Some web-accessible examples of library mission statements from different sectors are listed below:

  • • Chicago Public Library www.chipublib.org/003cpl/mission.html

  • • Countway Medical Library, Harvard University www.countway.harvard.edu/countway/mission.shtml

  • • Library of Congress www.loc.gov/about/mission/

  • • American Library Association www.ala.org/ala/ourassociation/governingdocs/policymanual/mission.htm.

    • As can be seen from these examples, library mission statements need not be long documents, and indeed summarizing the aims and objectives of the library in a short but meaningful and inspiring way can work well. If you look closely at each of the mission statements cited, they use very specific keywords to get over the role of each of the institutions.

  • Part 3 - Information organization and access

  • G. G. Chowdhury, Paul F. Burton, David McMenemy, Alan Poulter
  • Book:
    Librarianship
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    20 December 2007, pp 85-88

  • Summary

    In a sense information organization and retrieval constitute the core of library and information activities, because together these activities facilitate easy access to information, be it in the context of a traditional library, a digital library or the web. Classification and cataloguing are the two main sets of activities that have been practised in libraries for centuries in order to properly organize information resources on the library's shelves. The main objective of the information organization activity in libraries has been to facilitate easy access to the shelved information resources. However, in today's world, where users can get access to information from a variety of channels in the printed as well as digital environment, the need for appropriate organization and processing has become even more important. Nevertheless, organization and processing of digital information in the digital environment is a challenging task, since conventional tools and techniques used for organizing information in the printed world do not work as well in the digital context, and often new approaches, tools and techniques have to be used for appropriate organization and processing of information in order to facilitate easy and fast access to information.

    Compared with cataloguing and classification, information retrieval – the process of indexing information resources for searching and retrieval using computers – is of more recent origin. However, studies and research in information retrieval have grown faster because of the advance of ICT and the widespread use of the web.

    Classification, cataloguing and information retrieval, as well as a number of associated tools and techniques such as bibliographic formats, metadata standards, vocabulary control tools and so on, are used in the organization and retrieval of information in different environments in today's print and digital information world. This part of the book discusses these concepts and the related issues. It is divided into four chapters:

    Chapter 10: Classification

    Chapter 11: Cataloguing, bibliographic formats and metadata

    Chapter 12: Subject indexing and vocabulary control

    Chapter 13: Information retrieval.

    After reading theses chapters, readers should have a basic understanding of the various approaches to organizing and processing information resources for easy access and retrieval in both the print and digital information environments.

  • Part 7 - Education and research in librarianship

  • G. G. Chowdhury, Paul F. Burton, David McMenemy, Alan Poulter
  • Book:
    Librarianship
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    20 December 2007, pp 273-276

  • Summary

    Education in modern librarianship began in the USA over 125 years ago. Initially it was more like a professional training programme focusing on practical aspects of the job. The first set of postgraduate programmes was introduced in US universities in the 1920s. Library education in the UK also began just after the First World War, but was limited to only one university until 1946, when the Scottish School of Librarianship was formed in Glasgow. A number of other library schools followed in the 1960s. Several librarianship programmes were introduced in the Indian subcontinent during the first half of the 20th century.

    Today librarianship as an academic course of study is offered mostly at postgraduate level throughout the world, though the nomenclature of the courses as well as the contents vary significantly. Courses are offered in different modes – through classroom education offering face-to-face teaching, as well as online and distance learning courses, all either full-time or part-time. Several institutions and professional associations offer specific course modules through continuing professional development (CPD) programmes and summer schools. Professional associations such as the ALA and CILIP play a great role in the accreditation of librarianship courses.

    Although librarianship began as a professional course, providing practical training in different aspects of the job, over the years it grew as a major academic discipline with emphasis on research in both the theoretical and practical aspects of librarianship. Research degrees are offered by most of the university departments that provide postgraduate education in librarianship, though several major libraries – notably national libraries – and specially set up research centres (e.g. the Centre for Digital Library Research at the University of Strathclyde) are also engaged in research and development activities.

    This part of the book provides an overview of the academic and research programmes in librarianship throughout the world through the following two chapters:

    Chapter 25: Education in librarianship

    Chapter 26: Research in librarianship.

    The main objective of this part is to provide an understanding of how education in librarianship is currently offered and a brief introduction to the different kinds of research practices and methods in librarianship.

  • 12 - Subject indexing and vocabulary control

  • from Part 3 - Information organization and access
  • G. G. Chowdhury, Paul F. Burton, David McMenemy, Alan Poulter
  • Book:
    Librarianship
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    20 December 2007, pp 115-122

  • Summary

    Introduction

    Chapter 10 showed how library classification schemes help us allocate a specific class number to an information resource so that it can be placed at a particular location on the library's shelves. This helps users find a specific information resource or related information resources together. But how would a user know where to look for items on a given subject, say e-commerce or digital photography or travel and tourism? Clearly, users cannot be expected to learn the notation used by library classification schemes. Librarians deal with this problem by using subject indexing and vocabulary control tools.

    These are used to standardize the vocabulary of indexing and retrieval. They are natural language tools, and contain natural language terms that can be used for indexing and retrieval purposes. Subject heading lists such as the Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH) are vocabulary control tools that provide a verbal representation of subjects that are used as index terms for users to facilitate their search. Users can search by the appropriate subject headings, e-commerce or chemical engineering, say, and once they find a match they then note down the corresponding class number that points them to the specific location on the library's shelves. Thus, a combination of classification schemes and subject heading lists helps librarians organize information resources on the library's shelves and helps users find the resources required.

    The main objective of this chapter is to provide an overview of two main types of vocabulary control tools used in information organization and processing: subject heading lists and thesauri. After reading this chapter, readers should have an understanding of the basic concepts of a subject heading list with special reference to LCSH, and the basic characteristics and use of a thesaurus in information organization and access.

    Subject heading lists

    A subject heading list is an alphabetical list of terms and phrases, with appropriate cross-references and notes, that can be used as a source of headings suitable to represent the subject content of an information resource. Under each term or phrase are listed other terms or phrases that are semantically related to it. LCSH is the most extensive list of subject headings. The Sears List of Subject Headings (Miller and Goodsell, 2004) is a long-standing smaller work designed for small to medium-sized libraries.

  • Preface

  • G. G. Chowdhury, Paul F. Burton, David McMenemy, Alan Poulter
  • Book:
    Librarianship
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    20 December 2007, pp xiii-xvi

  • Summary

    Historical evidence suggests that libraries existed in ancient Egypt as early as 1250 BC. Although the nature, purpose and characteristics of these libraries were different from today's libraries, the main objective, the collection, organization and processing of information resources for easier and better access, has remained at the core of librarianship.

    In the past librarians played the role of keepers of information resources with responsibility for providing conditional access to the collections for specific users. Modern librarians have a variety of roles, ranging from collection development and management including archiving and preservation, to organization and processing of information resources, managing access to information resources, providing information services of different kinds, designing and providing user education and training services, and a variety of management activities including technology and project management. Given such a variety of tasks, the job of a librarian in today's world has become very complex and demanding. University education programmes and a variety of in-service and continuing education programmes train and equip library and information professionals in accomplishing their tasks effectively and efficiently, and moreover professionally.

    The nature of the job and role of librarians have changed over the centuries, and drastically so in recent years with the introduction of information and communication technologies in different areas of librarianship. The profession has been influenced and modified by a variety of socio-political changes, and developments of human civilization in general.

    While the core of the profession has remained the same – dealing with information and providing services to users – the terminology used to define and redefine the job of a librarian, as well as to reflect the nature and complexities of the profession, has changed. The most commonly used terms to define the profession include: library science, library and information science, information service management, information management and more recently knowledge management. Several researchers have defined and compared the scope and connotations of these terms. S. R. Ranganathan, in the early 1930s, introduced the term ‘library science’ by proposing five fundamental laws governing the ethos of the profession. The introduction of computers and communication technologies in different aspects of the profession has focused attention on its scientific nature, but there are arguments for its humanistic nature too; librarianship has also been defined as a social science since it deals with human beings and society at large.

  • 2 - The history of libraries

  • from Part 1 - Libraries and information services: evolution or revolution?
  • G. G. Chowdhury, Paul F. Burton, David McMenemy, Alan Poulter
  • Book:
    Librarianship
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    20 December 2007, pp 17-24

  • Summary

    Introduction

    ‘My library, was Dukedom large enough’

    (William Shakespeare, The Tempest, I.ii.109)

    ‘A library is thought in cold storage’

    (A Book of Quotations, Lord Samuel, Cresset Press, 1947)

    ‘I have always imagined that paradise will be a kind of library’

    (Jorge Luis Borges, Poema de los Dones from El Hacedor, 1960)

    The above quotes give voice to deep-seated meanings of the term ‘library’. At core, there is the function of the library as a storehouse of knowledge. Knowledge, its generation and development, is what distinguishes people from the world around them. We alone of all creatures strive to understand the world and to codify and preserve our understanding. A library is the place in which knowledge is stored that has been articulated and recorded in some way. The role of a knowledge storehouse is an important one. The library is the place in which we are most likely to encounter new knowledge, and thus the library need not be seen as a lifeless warehouse but rather as a vibrant place of wonder and enlightenment, somewhere one could stay forever because of the continuing stimulus it provides.

    One of the quotes above is from Jorge Luis Borges, who was in charge of the National Library of Argentina. As well as a librarian, he was also a writer of short fiction. His most famous story is ‘The Library of Babel’ in which Babel is described as an infinite library: each section has six connecting points to six identical sections in all four compass directions as well as up and down, and so on, never ending. Each section contains ‘books’, which contain random characters. Because every possible combination of characters is covered in these books, then every book ever written, and books not yet written, will be hidden among the many, many books containing nothing but doggerel. Life is searching the books of this library for those few that have meaning. This story captures both the promise of libraries, to contain explanations, and also their flaw, the problem of how to find what you want.

    Thinking Point

    Try to recall times in films, television shows or other media productions in which librarians and/or libraries have appeared. Is there a predominant ‘media image’ for librarians and libraries?

  • 26 - Research in librarianship

  • from Part 7 - Education and research in librarianship
  • G. G. Chowdhury, Paul F. Burton, David McMenemy, Alan Poulter
  • Book:
    Librarianship
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    20 December 2007, pp 285-298

  • Summary

    Introduction

    Informal and practice-led research began long before the introduction of formal education programmes in librarianship. It led to the development of essential tools and standards and best practice guidelines in classification, cataloguing and indexing, reference and advisory services, and so on.

    Today most of the university departments that offer postgraduate degree programmes in librarianship also offer PhD and in some cases MPhil degrees in librarianship. However, much librarianship research today is practice- rather than theory-led, and many research projects and activities are undertaken not as part of a formal degree, but as part of research and development activities, designed to resolve practical problems facing the library and information profession. Though some research has been funded by government and other agencies including libraries, in general funding for research in librarianship has a history of being in short supply compared with other disciplines engaged in professional education and research.

    This chapter provides a broad overview of research themes and research methods and data collection techniques used by researchers in the field of librarianship.

    The nature of research in librarianship

    Formal research in librarianship is done through academic research programmes at universities leading to MPhil or PhD degrees; such research may be theoretical and/or practical in nature. Formal, scholarly and/or practical research in librarianship also takes place in the form of research projects funded by national and international funding bodies and charities, as well as professional associations and institutions. Projects of this nature are designed to explore specific research issues and questions, or aim to find solutions to some practical problems. In addition to the formal research degrees and research projects, a large amount of practice-led research activity is carried out by library professionals in the course of their day-to-day work, or as a one-off activity. This kind of research project explores various professional issues and practical problems with a view to finding solutions or developing benchmarks, best practices and so on.

    In the UK library research has been primarily funded by the British Library Research and Development funding scheme in the past. Current sources of funding include the Arts and Humanities Research Council, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, the Scottish Library and Research Council, and so on.

  • 8 - Collection management and collection development

  • from Part 2 - Library and information resources and services
  • G. G. Chowdhury, Paul F. Burton, David McMenemy, Alan Poulter
  • Book:
    Librarianship
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    20 December 2007, pp 65-72

  • Summary

    Introduction

    Libraries exist to collect and preserve information resources for the user groups that they serve. As discussed in Chapter 6, different types of resource present their own challenges to librarians.

    While Chapter 6 focused on individual types of resource, collections as a whole need to be managed appropriately, and a library should have a collection development policy in place to ensure staff and users understand how that is to be done. This chapter will discuss collection management and collection development as a whole, rather than focusing on specific types of collection. It will deal with some of the macro and micro issues related to how the librarian acquires and maximizes the best use of the collection.

    Collection management

    Collection management is a term that defines the totality of processes and procedures involved in maintaining a library collection. Dixon suggests that collection management ‘includes all the processes, from selection to conservation of library materials, to meet the needs of users within budgetary and resource constraints’ (Dixon, 2002, 87). Thus the term includes selection, purchasing, processing, development and weeding of library collections, all of which will be discussed below.

    Acquisition of library materials is done on behalf of a user group, and collection management starts at the point material is being selected for the library to purchase. The librarian chooses stock carefully based on the aims of the library itself and the needs of the user group the library serves. Material selected and provided must be appropriate for the audience that will make use of it.

    Print materials

    Every book published has a unique identifier known as an International Standard Book Number, or ISBN. This system allows each book to be identified clearly, and consists of a string of numbers that identify the book in question. Until 1 January 2007 allocated ISBNs were 10 digits long. For instance, the 10-digit ISBN of the present book can be broken down as follows:

    1-85604-617-6

    The code number 1 represents the country the book is published in, in this case the UK; 85604 is the unique publisher code for Facet Publishing; 617 is the unique title number for this specific book; and 6 is a check number used for administrative purposes.

  • 13 - Information retrieval

  • from Part 3 - Information organization and access
  • G. G. Chowdhury, Paul F. Burton, David McMenemy, Alan Poulter
  • Book:
    Librarianship
    Published by:
    Facet
    Published online:
    08 June 2018
    Print publication:
    20 December 2007, pp 123-140

  • Summary

    Introduction

    The term ‘information retrieval’ was coined in 1952 and gained popularity in the research community from 1961 onwards (Sparck Jones and Willett, 1997). It describes the process of retrieving information from an organized (indexed) collection of information resources. Today this process is most familiarly carried out by search engines, the tools used to retrieve information from the web.

    Information retrieval systems originally meant text retrieval systems, since they were designed to deal with textual documents. However, modern information retrieval systems deal with multimedia information comprising text, audio, images and video. While many features of conventional text retrieval systems are equally applicable to multimedia information retrieval, the specific nature of audio, image and video information has called for the development of new tools and techniques for information retrieval.

    The main objective of this chapter is to provide an overview of the basic concept, components and functions of an information retrieval system. Detailed and comparative discussions of the features of different types of information retrieval system are beyond the scope of this chapter, but the examples shown here will help readers understand the broad similarities, and the specific differences, in the approaches, tools and techniques used for retrieval of information in different systems and contexts.

    Components of an information retrieval system

    Broadly speaking, information retrieval encompasses all the activities related to the organization, processing of and access to information resources of all forms and formats. An information retrieval system has various components, such as:

  • • the input subsystem: the information resources themselves, ranging from simple text documents to multimedia information items comprising images, audio and video

  • • the indexing subsystem: the various tools, techniques, standards and computational procedures used to prepare one or more indexes of the information collection to facilitate easy access and retrieval

  • • the vocabulary subsystem: the various tools, techniques and standards used to standardize the vocabulary used in indexing and searching information

  • • the retrieval, or searching and matching, subsystem: the various computational models and techniques used to search one or more collections of information resources though one or more indexes

  • • the user-system interface subsystem: the gateway through which a user interacts with an information system, which usually allows the user to browse and/or search one or more collections of information resources, and view and process the retrieved output.

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