Information retrieval is the process of searching within a document collection for a particular information need (called a query).
Although dominated by recent events following the invention of the computer, information retrieval actually has a long and glorious tradition.
The earliest document collections were recorded on the painted walls of caves. A cave dweller interested in searching a collection of cave paintings to answer a particular information query had to travel by foot, and stand, staring in front of each painting.
Unfortunately, it’s hard to collect and artifact without being gruesome.
Before the invention of paper, ancient Romans and Greeks recorded information on papyrus rolls.
Some papyrus artifacts from ancient Rome had tags attached to the rolls. These tags were an ancient form of today’s Post-it Note, and make an excellent addition to our museum.
A tag contained a short summary of the rolled document and was attached in order to save readers from unnecessarily unraveling a long irrelevant document.
These abstract also appeared in oral form. At the start of Greek plays in the fifth century B.C., the chorus recited an abstract of the ensuing action.
While no actual classifications scheme has survived from the artifacts of Greek and Roman libraries, we do know that another elementary information retrieval tool, the table of content, first appeared in Greek scrolls from the second century B.C.
As the stories goes, the Libraries of Pergamum threatened to overtake the celebrated Library of Alexandria as the best Library in the world, claiming the largest collection of papyrus rolls.
As the result, the Egyptians ceased the supply of papyrus to Pergamum, so the Pergamenians invented an alternative writing material parchment, which is made from thin layers of animal skin.
Unlike papyrus, parchment did not roll easily, so scribes folded several sheets of parchment and sewed them into books.
Other documents collections sprung up in a variety of fields. This dramatically accelerated with the re-invention of the printing press by Johann Gutenberg in 1450.
The wealthy proudly boasted of their private libraries and public libraries were instituted in America in the 1700s at the prompting of Benjamin Franklin.
More orderly ways of maintaining records of a collection’s holdings were devised.
These inventions were progress, yet still search was not completely in the hands of the information seeker. It took the inventions of the digital computer (1940s and 1950s) and the subsequent inventions of computerized search systems to move forward that goal.
The first computerized search systems used special syntax to automatically retrieve book and article information related to a user’s query.
Unfortunately, the cumbersome syntax kept search largely in the domain of libraries trained on the systems.
In1989 the storage, access and searching of document collections was revolutions by and invention named the World Wide Web by its founder Tim Berners-Lee.
Of course, our museum must include artifacts from this revolution such as a webpage, some HTML, and a hyperlink or two.
The World Wide Web became the ultimate signal of the dominance of the Information Age and the death of the Industrial Age.
Yet despite the revolution in information storage and access ushered in by the Web users initialing web searches found themselves floundering.
They were looking for the proverbial needle in an enormous, ever growing information haystack.
Al this change in 1998 when link analysis hit the information retrieval scene. The most successful search engines began using link analysis, technique that exploited the additional information inherent in the hyperlink structure of the Web, to improve the quality of search results.
Web search improved dramatically, and web searchers religiously used and promoted their favorite engines like Google and AltaVista.
History of Information Retrieval
