Introduction to information and documentation services

1
Introduction to information and documentation
services
2
Course structure

• Information services and users
• Documentation and knowledge organization
• Subject analysis and presentation

3
1. Information services

• Traditional services
• physical (printed) documents
• classical (physical) access (card catalogues,
  printed indexes, ...)
• librarian as a care taker

4
1. Information services

• Contemporary services
• digital access to physical material (computer
  catalogues, databases, ...)
• digital material, digital libraries, internet
• librarian as a guide, advisor and access provider

5
1. Information services

• Information Retrieval
• the meaning of the word (terminology)
• models of IR (from classical to contemporary)
• process of IR and its constituent parts (from
  indexed information resources, user interfaces
  and user needs, IR techniques and representation
  of results)
• internet (WWW) search

6
1.a Information services and users

• Principle of least effort
• User interfaces
• Users have different needs
• some need high recall (exhaustivity)
• but mostly high precision (mostly they do not
  want to go through large amount of hits)

7
2. Documentation / Knowledge Organization

• What is Knowledge Organization?
• Reasons for its beginning (explosion of
  information)
• Why is it needed?
• Different sorts
• document description (cataloguing)
• subject analysis and representation
• Historical development

8
3. Subject analysis and representation

• classical (indexing, classifying, abstracting)
• contemporary (standards for document description,
  metadata, automatic indexing and classifying)
• examples
• practical work