Monday, July 26, 2010

ETL505 Module 2 - Information Retrieval Tools

Library information retrieval tools include:

Traditional information retrieval tools

  • library catalogues - based around summaries of the resources described (bibliographic records)
Bibliographic records contain two parts:
a) description of the item's physical attributes (number of pages, title, size, description, notes) and details about the resource's creation, publication (author, publisher)
b) description of what the document is about (subject), consisting of words selected from a standard list of authorised terms (subject headings, thesaurus, classification (call) number, abstract. (subject content) 


  • classification schemes - Dewey Decimal Classification, Library of Congress

  • controlled vocabularies - (info retrieval tool for indexing) thesauri, subject headings. Provide standardised list of words/terms for a subject/s regardless of location so the same term/s are used by the indexer when information is searched.  Library of Congress subject headings most common. Controlled vocabularies used to assign standard words/terms when describing the subject of an information resource, the nature of the resource (dictionary, film, journal) and are used in library catalogues and many databases.


Digital information retrieval tools
  • full-text searching software

  • image and sound retrieval tools

  • Internet search engines





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