Hi Ben, I too am at Columbia. If in your search you are interested in the history of the retrieval question and its possible future, you might find the article, Libraries of the Future 1945-1965 interesting reading. You can see it at: http://www.columbia.edu/~hauben/libraries-of-future.doc It looks at the visions of Vannevar Bush, John Kemeny and JCR Licklider asking the question, how can the whole corpus of knowledge be accessed returning the highest possible degree of relevancy. All three of the visions included considering how the human brain works. Licklider's answer in 1962 was the search had to be more semantic than syntactic. More recent work is cited especially that of Bruce Schatz, e.g., "Information Retrieval in Digital Libraries: Bringing Search to the Net". In: Science (Washington, DC). 275 (1997) 17. 327-334. Online at http://www.canis.uiuc.edu/archive/papers/science-irdl-journal.pdf For me, the question of how to successfully search the whole corpus of knowledge is the most important question for digital library research. Good luck with your research. Take care. Jay

Date: Tue, 16 May 2006 00:24:01 -0600 From: "Ben Peters" <bjpeters@gmail.com> Subject: [Air-l] Looking for good search-engine literature To: air-l@listserv.aoir.org

Hi,

I'm Ben Peters, a doctoral student at Columbia struggling with how to study search-engines. There's the problem of plenty: searching search-engines produces a library of material with no card catalog. There's the problem of self-reflection: studying search-engines through search-engines makes one pause to consider. Must one remove herself from the medium in order to study it (and other second-order issues)? But how else can one study a subject so young, except by using it to study itself? And there's the problem of posterity: search-engines seem to be evolving so quickly, with the web they index, that one struggles to step back from detailing a close search-engine genealogy to view the larger historical role search-engines may be having upon society. The species of search-engines is as important as their specifics manifestations.

Plus I'm sure there's at least a billion other problems I haven't happened upon yet.

Anyway, I've got a month to devote to this topic right now. Someone throw me an anchor, please: citations to institutions, people, books, articles, sites, or any related discussion would be hugely appreciated.

Pleasantly perplexed,

Ben