The History of Information Retrieval

Nowadays, information is the cornerstone of the modern enterprise and the web became the largest and most accessible information resources. The ability to gather, arrange, manipulate information with computers has given practice as well as for business people in order to manage information in an effective way. Information retrieval is a process and techniques of searching and interpreting information in order to store the data for easy retrieval when needed. The development of information retrieval systems is reviewed from its early history to the present time. The article entitled “Seven Ages of Information Retrieval”, written by Michael Lesk explained about the history or the beginning of information retrieval based on the imaginary of Vannevar Bush’s 1945 and theory of Warren Weaver in 1949 and the author try to relate with ideology of Shakespeare 1955 which is seven ages of man, starting from infancy and leading to senility. This article gives useful information about transformation of information retrieval. From my observation, there have many important elements that have been discussed in this article but what are really give impact to me is people, theory and transformation.

A first person is Dr. Vannevar Bush. He is Director of the Office of Scientific Research and Development, issued a report in 1945 where his views also appeared in a paper called “As We May Think”. In “As We May Think,” Bush turned his thought to the future of scientific research. It was clear to him that science was an essential tool for interacting with the world, as well as for organizing and disseminating knowledge. Bush believed that the large volume of information becoming available to scientists would overwhelm traditional methods of acquisitio...

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... for the future, we able to achieved more than that. In this stage, Bush also talked about automatic typing from dictation and OCR.

Works Cited

Charles T. Meadow, Information Retrieval-A View of its Past, Present, and Future, Retrieved Oct 10, 2011 from http://www.cais-acsi.ca/proceedings/1999/Meadow_1999.pdf.

History of the vision, Retrieved Oct 10, 2011 from http://www.osti.gov/physicalsciences/wkhistory.html.

Neylon Caspi, AJ Shankar, Jingtao Wang, “As We May Think” Vannevar Bush, Retrieved Oct 10, 2011 from http://www.moralfiber.org/eylon/berkeley/cs294-classics/bush-lecture/bush-as-we-may-think.pdf.

Mina Rees, Warren Weaver 1894-1978, Retrieved Oct 10, 2011 from www.nap.edu/html/biomems/wweaver.pdf.

Michael Lesk & Bellcore, “The seven ages of information retrieval”, Retrieved Oct 10, 2011 from http://www.lesk.com/mlesk/ages/ages.html.