History
| “ | But do you know that, although I have kept the diary for months past, it never once struck me how I was going to find any particular part of it in case I wanted to look it up? | ” |
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—Dr Seward, Bram Stoker's Dracula, 1897 |
The idea of using computers to search for relevant pieces of information was popularized in the article As We May Think by Vannevar Bush in 1945. The first automated information retrieval systems were introduced in the 1950s and 1960s. By 1970 several different techniques had been shown to perform well on small text corpora such as the Cranfield collection (several thousand documents). Large-scale retrieval systems, such as the Lockheed Dialog system, came into use early in the 1970s.
In 1992, the US Department of Defense along with the National Institute of Standards and Technology (NIST), cosponsored the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC) as part of the TIPSTER text program. The aim of this was to look into the information retrieval community by supplying the infrastructure that was needed for evaluation of text retrieval methodologies on a very large text collection. This catalyzed research on methods that scale to huge corpora. The introduction of web search engines has boosted the need for very large scale retrieval systems even further.
The use of digital methods for storing and retrieving information has led to the phenomenon of digital obsolescence, where a digital resource ceases to be readable because the physical media, the reader required to read the media, the hardware, or the software that runs on it, is no longer available. The information is initially easier to retrieve than if it were on paper, but is then effectively lost.
Read more about this topic: Information Retrieval
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