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We should admit in theory what is already very largely a case in practice, that the main currency of scientific information is the secondary sources in the forms of abstracts, reports, tables, &c., and that the primary sources are only for detailed reference by very few people. It is possible that the fate of most…
As individuals, we are amazingly ignorant and incapable. How many of us, alone in a wilderness, could make a flint knife? Is there anyone now alive who knows even a tenth of everything there is to know in science? How many of those employed in the electricity industry could make any of its components, such as wires or…
I do find that smaller and smaller bits of information can command the full attention of my over-educated mind. And not just me; everyone reports succumbing to the lure of fast, tiny, interruptions of information. In response to this incessant barrage of bits, the culture of the Internet has been busy unbundling…
Think of the number of things you are likely to say to someone else today -- or the number of words you will hear other people speak. You might listen to the radio, watch television, have dinner with other people, help your children with the homework, answer the phone to people far away. Most of what is said in these…
IR is the focus for an arms race between algorithms to extract information from repositories as those repositories get larger and more complex, and users' demands get harder to satisfy (either in terms of response time or complexity of query). One obvious issue with respect to IR over the Web is that the Web has no QA…
The first thing to face is that we shall not store all the technical and scientific papers in computer memory. We may tore the parts that can be summarized most succinctly--the quantitative parts and the reference citations--but not the whole. Books are among the most beautifully engineered, and human-engineered…