Information Retrieval is an international forum for theory and experiment in information retrieval and its application in the networked information environment.
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Information Retrieval is an international forum for theory and experiment in information retrieval and its application in the networked information environment. |
If you would like to review one of the books listed below, please contact the Book Review Editor, Efthimis N. Efthimiadis at efthimis@u.washington.edu. An Information Retrieval book review is a scholarly review; as such, it should be a critical analysis of the work indicating its contribution to our discipline. A book review is typically four (4) to ten (10) double-spaced pages or approximatelly 1000-3000 words and should be completed within six (6) weeks of receiving the book and the Book Editor's confirmation that you may review it for Information Retrieval. When the review is completed, please submit a printed copy, an electronic copy on diskette, and a signed copy of the Kluwer Consent to Publish and Transfer of Copyright Form. Kluwer prefers that contributors use the Kluwer LaTeX journal style file for the electronic copy of the review, but will accept Word, WordPerfect, or ASCII (text only) documents. The review should be mailed directly to the Book Review Editor:
Efthimis N. Efthimiadis
Associate Professor
The
Information School
University of Washington
Box 352840
Seattle, WA
98195-2840
Tel: (206) 616-6077; Fax: (206) 616-3152
Email:
efthimis@u.washington.edu
Successful
Keyword Searching
Randall M. MacDonald and Susan Priest
MacDonald. Westport: Greenwood Publishing Group Inc, 2000.
Students are using electronic resources more than ever before to locate information for assignments. Without the proper search terms, results are incomplete, and students are frustrated. Using the keywords, key people, organizations, and web sites provided in this book, compiled from the most commonly used databases, students will be able to perform successful searches for 144 of the most popular research topics, on their own or in the classroom.
Empirical
Methods for Exploiting Parallel Texts
I. Dan Melamed.
Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001.
Parallel texts (bitexts) are a goldmine of linguistic knowledge, because the translation of a text into another language can be viewed as a detailed annotation of what that text means. Knowledge about translational equivalence, which can be gleaned from bitexts, is of central importance for applications such as manual and machine translation, cross-language information retrieval, and corpus linguistics. The availability of bitexts has increased dramatically since the advent of the Web, making their study an exciting new area of research in natural language processing. This book lays out the theory and the practical techniques for discovering and applying translational equivalence at the lexical level. It is a start-to-finish guide to designing and evaluating many translingual applications.
Information,
Knowledge, Text
Julian Warner. Lanham: Scarecrow Press Inc.,
2001.
This book is concerned with connections between computing and writing and precursors to modern information technologies. It brings historical and humanistic perspectives to bear on contemporary information developments, enabling a deepening understanding of those developments. Rather than developing a single overarching thesis, Warner weaves together several themes, basing his chapters on carefully edited journal articles and conference presentations. Chapters treat the history of writing and signal transmission, the concept of exactness as it relates to human semiotic constructions, forms of representation in formal logic and automata studies, copyright, and graphic communication. A final chapter offers a review of literature that further explores the established themes.
Principles
of Data Mining
David Hand, Heikki Mannila and Padhraic Smyth.
Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001.
The growing interest in data mining is motivated by a common problem across disciplines: how does one store, access, model, and ultimately describe and understand very large data sets? Historically, different aspects of data mining have been addressed independently by different disciplines. This is the first truly interdisciplinary text on data mining, blending the contributions of information science, computer science, and statistics.
Spotting
and Discovering Terms through Natural Language Processing
Christian Jacquemin. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2001.
In this book Christian Jacquemin shows how the power of natural language processing (NLP) can be used to advance text indexing and information retrieval (IR). Jacquemin's novel tool is FASTR, a parser that normalizes terms and recognizes term variants. Since there are more meanings in a language than there are words, FASTR uses a metagrammar composed of shallow linguistic transformations that describe the morphological, syntactic, semantic, and pragmatic variations of words and terms. The acquired parsed terms can then be applied for precise retrieval and assembly of information. The use of a corpus-based unification grammar to define, recognize, and combine term variants from their base forms allows for intelligent information access to, or "linguistic data tuning" of, heterogeneous texts. FASTR can be used to do automatic controlled indexing, to carry out content-based Web searches through conceptually related alternative query formulations, to abstract scientific and technical extracts, and even to translate and collect terms from multilingual material. Jacquemin provides a comprehensive account of the method and implementation of this innovative retrieval technique for text processing.
Essentials of
Nonverbal Assessment
Steve McCallum , Bruce Bracken and John
Wasserman. New York: John Wiley & Sons Inc, 2001.
Sorting Things Out:
Classification and Its Consequences
Geoffrey C. Bowker and
Susan Leigh Star. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999.
Geoffrey Bowker and Susan Leigh Star explore the role of categories and standards in shaping the modern world. In a clear and lively style, they investigate a variety of classification systems, including the International Classification of Diseases, the Nursing Interventions Classification, race classification under apartheid in South Africa, and the classification of viruses and of tuberculosis. Sorting Things Out has a moral agenda, for each standard and category valorizes some point of view and silences another. Standards and classifications produce advantage or suffering. Jobs are made and lost; some regions benefit at the expense of others. How these choices are made and how we think about that process are at the moral and political core of this work. The book is an important empirical source for understanding the building of information infrastructures.
The Theory and
Practice of Discourse Parsing and Summarization
Daniel Marcu.
Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2000.
Until now, most discourse researchers have assumed that full semantic understanding is necessary to derive the discourse structure of texts. This book documents the first serious attempt to construct automatically and use nonsemantic computational structures for text summarization. Daniel Marcu develops a semantics-free theoretical framework that is both general enough to be applicable to naturally occurring texts and concise enough to facilitate an algorithmic approach to discourse analysis. He presents and evaluates two discourse parsing methods: one uses manually written rules that reflect common patterns of usage of cue phrases such as "however" and "in addition to"; the other uses rules that are learned automatically from a corpus of discourse structures. By means of a psycholinguistic experiment, Marcu demonstrates how a discourse-based summarizer identifies the most important parts of texts at levels of performance that are close to those of humans.
Rethinking Public
Key Infrastructures and Digital Certificates: Building in Privacy
Stefan A. Brands. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000.
In this book Stefan Brands proposes cryptographic building blocks for the design of digital certificates that preserve privacy without sacrificing security. Such certificates function in much the same way as cinema tickets or subway tokens: anyone can establish their validity and the data they specify, but no more than that. Furthermore, different actions by the same person cannot be linked. Certificate holders have control over what information is disclosed, and to whom. Subsets of the proposed cryptographic building blocks can be used in combination, allowing a cookbook approach to the design of public key infrastructures. Potential applications include electronic cash, electronic postage, digital rights management, pseudonyms for online chat rooms, health care information storage, electronic voting, and even electronic gambling.
Causality:
Models, Reasoning, and Inference
Judea Pearl. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2000.
Presents the first unified account of the various approaches to causation. Offers simple mathematical tools for analyzing the relationships between causal connections and statistical associations. Provides students with natural models, simple identification procedures, and perecise mathematical definitions of causal concepts. Treats such concepts as: actions, causal-effect, exogeneity, confounding, direct and indirect effects, ignorability, Simpson's paradox, structural equations, path coefficients, instrumental variables, attribution, explanation, probability of causation, and single-event causation.
Information
Seeking in Electronic Environments
Gary Marchionini. Cambridge,
UK: Oxford University Press Incorporated, 1995.
In the computer age, it is essential for individuals to develop skills and strategies for manipulating, storing, and retrieving electronic information. This book considers how electronic technologies have changed these skills and strategies and augmented the fundamental human activity of information seeking. Writing from the point of view of the user rather than the computer, the author makes a case for creating new interface designs that allow information seekers to choose what strategy to apply according to their immediate needs. Such systems may be designed by providing information seekers with alternative interface mechanisms for displaying and manipulating multiple levels of representation for information objects. This book is multidisciplinary in approach and aims to bridge the perspectives of information science, computer science and education. It will be essential reading for researchers and graduate students in these fields.
Successes and
Failures of Digital Libraries
Susan Harum and Michael Twidale,
Editors. Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2000.
"Successes and Failures of Digital Libraries," is a provocative discussion of issues related to digital libraries and their transition from theory and research development to actual useful and beneficial systems. Unlike other publications on this topic, the proceedings discuss not only the success but will also acknowledge the trials and failures that led up to the implementation of useful and user-friendly digital libraries.
From Gutenberg to
the Global Information Infrastructure: Access to Information in the Networked
World
Christine L. Borgman. Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000.
This book takes a close look at these and other questions of technology, behavior, and policy surrounding the GII. Topics covered include the design and use of digital libraries; behavioral and institutional aspects of electronic publishing; the evolving role of libraries; the life cycle of creating, using, and seeking information; and the adoption and adaptation of information technologies. The book takes a human-centered perspective, focusing on how well the GII fits into the daily lives of the people it is supposed to benefit. Taking a unique holistic approach to information access, the book draws on research and practice in computer science, communications, library and information science, information policy, business, economics, law, political science, sociology, history, education, and archival and museum studies. It explores both domestic and international issues. The author's own empirical research is complemented by extensive literature reviews and analyses.
Librarians as Learners, Librarians
as Teachers: The Diffusion of Internet Expertise in the Academic Lib rary
Patricia O' Brien Libutti, Editor. Chicago: Association of College
& Research Libraries, 1999.
This book focuses on the training role of the academic librarian with respect to the use of the Internet and the World Wide Web. Includes a literature review, reports of research, and case studies. Four sections of the volume address various aspects of teaching Internet use: Foundations of Internet Expertise in the Academic Library; Enlarging the Internet-Literate: Early Training and Experiences; The Present Tense: The Diffusion of the Internet into the Work Flow of Academic Librarians; and Preparing Librarians to Teach the Internet. Although focused on the academic environment, this work will be helpful to librarians in all types of settings.
Information
Design
Robert Jacobson, Editor. Cambridge: The MIT Press, 1999.
Information design is the newest of the design disciplines. As a sign of our times, when the crafting of messages and meaning is so central to our lives, information design is not only important--it is essential. Contemporary information designers seek to edify more than to persuade, to exchange more than to foist upon. With ever more powerful technologies of communication, we have learned that the issuer of designed information is as likely as the intended recipient to be changed by it, for better or worse. The contributors to this book are both cautionary and hopeful as they offer visions of how information design can be practiced diligently and ethically, for the benefit of information consumers as well as producers. They present various methods that seem to work, such as sense-making and way-finding. They make recommendations and serve as guides to a still young but extraordinarily pervasive--and persuasive--field.
An
Introduction to Support Vector Machines: and other kernel-based learning
methods
Nello Cristianini and John Shawe-Taylor. Cambridge, UK:
Cambridge University Press, 2000.
This is the first comprehensive introduction to Support Vector Machines (SVMs), a new generation learning system based on recent advances in statistical learning theory. Students will find the book both stimulating and accessible, while practitioners will be guided smoothly through the material required for a good grasp of the theory and its applications. The concepts are introduced gradually in accessible and self-contained stages, while the presentation is rigorous and thorough. Pointers to relevant literature and web sites containing software make it an ideal starting point for further study.
Automatic Indexing of Document
Texts
Marie-Francine Moens. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers,
2000.
Automatic Indexing and Abstracting of Document Texts summarizes the latest techniques of automatic indexing and abstracting, and the results of their application. It also places the techniques in the context of the study of text, manual indexing and abstracting, and the use of the indexing descriptions and abstracts in systems that select documents or information from large collections. Important sections of the book consider the development of new techniques for indexing and abstracting. The techniques involve the following: using text grammars, learning of the themes of the texts including the identification of representative sentences or paragraphs by means of adequate cluster algorithms, and learning of classification patterns of texts. In addition, the book is an attempt to illuminate new avenues for future research.
The
Business of Ecommerce: From Corporate Strategy to Technology
Paul May. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
The Business of ECommerce explains how to conduct business over the Web. Accessible and useful to both technical and nontechnical readers, the book describes the relevant business issues to technologists and technical issues to business managers. Paul May combines his experience as a consultant to both blue chip companies and Internet startups to provide a generic model for understanding e-commerce opportunities. He makes accessible all of the relevant technologies. This book empowers technical and business decision-makers to maximize the opportunities of e-commerce.
e-Enterprise:
Business Models, Architecture, and Components
Faisal Hoque.
Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, 2000.
How does a company succeed in the volatile world of ecommerce? The real challenge is to fully leverage the potential of the Internet as a means to building an agile enterprise. In e-Enterprise Faisal Hoque provides a business vision and a technological method for building an agile, electronically-based enterprise using reusable components. Aimed at CIOs, CEOs, and technologists alike, e-Enterprise explores the strategic challenges faced by companies as they embrace business in the networked economy of the future. It takes a step beyond the simple transaction-based ecommerce model and shows how a business can truly take advantage of rapidly evolving technology.
Information Retrieval:
Uncertainty and Logics: Advanced Models for the Representation and Retrieval of
Information
Cornelis Joost van Rijsbergen, Fabio Crestani, and
Mounia Lalmas, Editors. Boston: Kluwer Academic Publishers, 1998.
The use of logic to build IR models enables one to obtain models that are more general than earlier well-known IR models. Indeed, some logical models are able to represent within a uniform framework various features of IR systems such as hypermedia links, multimedia data, and user's knowledge. Logic also provides a common approach to the integration of IR systems with logical database systems. Finally, logic makes it possible to reason about an IR model and its properties. . . . However, logic by itself cannot fully model IR. The success or the failure of the inference of the query formula from the document formula is not enough to model relevance in IR. It is necessary to take into account the uncertainty inherent in such an inference process. In 1986, Van Rijsbergen proposed the uncertainty logical principle to model relevance as an uncertain inference process. When proposing the principle, Van Rijsbergen was not specific about which logic and which uncertainty theory to use. As a consequence, various logics and uncertainty theories have been proposed and investigated. The choice of an appropriate logic and uncertainty mechanism has been a main research theme in logical IR modeling leading to a number of logical IR models over the years. Information Retrieval: Uncertainty and Logics contains a collection of exciting papers proposing, developing and implementing logical IR models.
Text Retrieval and Filtering:
Analytic Models of Performance
Robert M. Losee. Boston: Kluwer
Academic Publishers, 1998.
Text Retrieval and Filtering: Analytical Models of Performance is the first book that addresses the problem of analytically computing the performance of retrieval and filtering systems. The book describes means by which retrieval may be studied analytically, allowing one to describe current performance, predict future performance, and to understand why systems perform as they do. The focus is on retrieving and filtering natural language text, with material addressing retrieval performance for the simple case of queries with a single term, the more complex case with multiple terms, both with term independence and term dependence, and for the use of grammatical information to improve performance. Unambiguous statements of the conditions under which one method or system will be more effective than another are developed.
Cross-Language Information
Retrieval
Gregory Grefenstette, Editor. Boston: Kluwer Academic
Publishers, 1998.
Cross-Language Information Retrieval is the first book that addresses the problem of accessing multilingual information through a single-language query. This research problem is receiving growing attention by US and foreign governments. Cross-Language Information Retrieval describes the problem, highlighting the differences between the field and the related areas of Machine Translation and Information Retrieval.
Design Wise: A User's Guide
for Evaluating Online Information Products and Services
Alison
Head. Medford: Information Today Inc, 1999.
Knowing how to size up user-centered interface design is becoming as important for people who choose and use information resources as for those who design them. This book introduces readers to the basics of interface design and explains why a design evaluation should be integrally tied to what we trade cash for, and fire up for everyone else to use—in settings of all kinds and sizes.
Insider Strategies for
Outsourcing Information Systems: How to Build Productive Partnerships and Avoid
Seductive Traps
Kathy M. Ripin and Leonard R. Sayles. New York:
Oxford University Press Incorporated, 1999.
As Kathy M. Ripin and Leonard R. Sayles point out, what may seem to executives like the proverbial free lunch--outside experts taking responsibility for the endless vexations associated with information systems management--is far from free. Often, new systems that are supposed to respond effortlessly to managerial commands are over-priced, clumsy, and sometimes useless. Insider Strategies for Outsourcing Information Systems offers executives and managers experience-based guidelines that will enable them to avoid the seductive myths and illusions that distort contractor selection and new system planning decisions.
Learner-Centered
Design: A Cognitive View of Managing Complexity in Product, Information, and
Environmental Design
Wayne Reeves. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage
Publications, 1999.
The issue of complexity, as applied to the way we gather information and learn, is a hallmark of this information age. The sheer amount of data, in addition to the increasingly technological way in which the data are delivered, have had profound effects on the ways in which we process information and, hopefully,learn. In this interesting and cutting edge volume, Wayne Reeves, a professor as well as consultant to Sun Microsystems, provides an overview of the field of complexity (including chaos theory, information literacy, and Knowledge Management Tools) and presents a working framework to help guide further research.
People Come First: User Centered
Academic Library Service
Dale S. Montanelli and Patricia F.
Stenstrom, Editors. Chicago: Association of College & Research Libraries,
1999.
Technology has enabled librarians to give better service than ever before. However, up to now it has not been used to redefine services in the systemwide manner that is needed if users are to be fully served. The time has come to reevaluate the functional approach to library organization. This is the provocative thesis that underlies this collection of ten essays that takes a look at library functions from the user's point of view.
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Digital Libraries: Philosophies,
Technical Design Considerations, and Example Scenarios is a balanced
overview of public services, collection development, administration, and
systems support, for digital libraries, with advice on adopting the latest
technologies that appear on the scene. As a professional in the library
and information science field, you will benefit from this special issue
that serves as an overview of selected directions, trends, possibilities,
limitations, enhancements, design principals, and ongoing projects for
integrated library and information
systems. |
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The World Wide Web is rapidly filling with more
text than anyone could have imagined a short time ago. However, the task
of determining which data is relevant has become appreciably harder. In
this original new work Richard Belew brings a cognitive science
perspective to the study of information as a computer science discipline.
He introduces the idea of Finding Out About (FOA), the process of actively
seeking out information relevant to a topic of interest. Belew describes
all facets of FOA, ranging from creating a good characterization of what
the user seeks to evaluating the successful performance of search engines.
His volume clearly shows how to build many of the tools that are useful
for searching collections of text and other media. While computer
scientists make up the book's primary audience, Belew skillfully presents
technical details in a manner that makes important themes accessible to
readers more comfortable with words than
equations. |
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In this book Kaj Grønbæk and Randall H. Trigg
present a set of principles for the design of open hypermedia systems and
provide concrete implications of these principles for issues ranging from
data structures to architectures and system integration, and for settings
as diverse as the World Wide Web and the
workplace. |
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Integrating the disparate disciplines of
descriptive cataloging, subject cataloging, indexing, and classification,
the book adopts a conceptual framework that views the process of
organizing information as the use of a special language of description
called a bibliographic language. The book is divided into two parts. The
first part is an analytic discussion of the intellectual foundation of
information organization. The second part moves from generalities to
particulars, presenting an overview of three bibliographic languages: work
languages, document languages, and subject languages. It looks at these
languages in terms of their vocabulary, semantics, and syntax. The book is
written in an exceptionally clear style, at a level that makes it
understandable to those outside the discipline of library and information
science. |
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This book allows students to learn the major information retrieval techniques for document ranking, indexing, searching, visualizing multimedia objects, and searching the Web. It covers main IR models (classic, networks, extended Boolean, generalized vector, latent semantic indexing, fuzzy), query operations, text operations searching, the main interface paradigms for query formation and visualization of results, models (Multos), languages (SQL3), indexing (R-trees, Gemini) and searching, and digital libraries. |
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Information Retrieval: Algorithms and Heuristics is a comprehensive introduction to the study of information retrieval covering both effectiveness and run-time performance. The focus of the presentation is on algorithms and heuristics used to find documents relevant to the user request and to find them fast. Through multiple examples, the most commonly used algorithms and heuristics needed are tackled. To facilitate understanding and applications, introductions to and discussions of computational linguistics, natural language processing, probability theory and library and computer science are provided. While this text focuses on algorithms and not on commercial product per se, the basic strategies used by many commercial products are described. Techniques that can be used to find information on the Web, as well as in other large information collections, are included. |
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The first comprehensive guide to explore the growing field of electronic information, The Text in the Machine: Electronic Texts in the Humanities will help you create and use electronic texts. This book explains the processes involved in developing computerized books on library Web sites, CD-ROMs, or your own Web site. With the information provided by The Text in the Machine, youll be able to successfully transfer written words to a digitized form and increase access to any kind of information |
Materialized Views: Techniques, Implementations, and Applications
Ashish Gupta and Inderpal Singh Mumick, Editors.
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999.
Review published in Information Retrieval, Vol. 4, No. 2, July 2001
When an application is built, an underlying data model is chosen to make that application effective. Frequently, other applications need the same data, only modeled differently. The naïve solution of copying the underlying data and modeling is costly in terms of storage and makes data maintenance and evolution impossible. View mechanisms are a technique to model data differently for various applications without affecting the underlying format and structure of the data. The technique enables applications to customize shared data objects without affecting other applications that use the same objects. The growing data-manipulation needs of companies cannot be met by existing legacy systems that contain valuable data. Thus view mechanisms are becoming increasingly important as a way to model and use legacy data in new applications.
Ink into Bits: A Web of Converging Media
Charles T. Meadow.
Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press Inc., 1998.
Review published in Information Retrieval, Vol. 4, No. 2, July 2001
Ink into Bits is concerned with the impact and advantages of new technologies on human experiences from publishing, to education, to everyday recreational reading. Included is a bibliography, a list of recommended reading, and an appendix of statistical charts which show how various factors relating to electronic publishing have changed over the years. Ink into Bits is intended for students in courses on communication or technology in society, for students of library and information science, for librarians, for writers, and for book people of all kinds. It discusses the practical realities of new computer and communication technologies in non-technical terms, and avoids the hype that surrounds "futurology" and "technology prophecy." A readable introduction to the future of the word: where it will ever remain, and new areas where it will likely appear.
Foundations of Statistical Natural Language Processing
Christopher D. Manning and Hinrich Schütze.
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999.
Review published in Information Retrieval, Vol. 4, No. 1, April 2001
Statistical approaches to processing natural language text have become dominant in recent years. This foundational text is the first comprehensive introduction to statistical natural language processing (NLP) to appear. The book contains all the theory and algorithms needed for building NLP tools. It provides broad but rigorous coverage of mathematical and linguistic foundations, as well as detailed discussion of statistical methods, allowing students and researchers to construct their own implementations. The book covers collocation finding, word sense disambiguation, probabilistic parsing, information retrieval, and other applications.
Managing Gigabytes: Compressing and Indexing Documents and Images
Ian H. Witten , Alistair Moffat and Timothy C. Bell.
San Francisco, CA: Morgan Kaufmann Publishers Inc, 1999.
Review published in Information Retrieval, Vol. 4, No. 1, April 2001
In this fully updated second edition of the highly acclaimed Managing Gigabytes, authors Witten, Moffat, and Bell continue to provide unparalleled coverage of state-of-the-art techniques for compressing and indexing data. Whatever your field, if you work with large quantities of information, this book is essential reading--an authoritative theoretical resource and a practical guide to meeting the toughest storage and access challenges. It covers the latest developments in compression and indexing and their application on the Web and in digital libraries. It also details dozens of powerful techniques supported by mg, the authors' own system for compressing, storing, and retrieving text, images, and textual images. mg's source code is freely available on the Web.
Advances in Automatic Text Summarization
Inderjeet Mani and Mark T. Maybury, Editors.
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 1999.
Review published in Information Retrieval, Vol. 4, No. 1, April 2001
Until now there has been no state-of-the-art collection of the most important writings in automatic text summarization. This book presents the key developments in the field in an integrated framework and suggests future research areas. The book is organized into six sections: Classical Approaches, Corpus-Based Approaches, Exploiting Discourse Structure, Knowledge-Rich Approaches, Evaluation Methods, and New Summarization Problem Areas.
Digital Libraries
William Y. Arms.
Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2000.
Review published in Information Retrieval, Vol. 4, No. 2, July 2001
The term "digital libraries" covers the creation and distribution of all types of information over networks, ranging from converted historical materials to kinds of information that have no analogues in the physical world. In some ways digital libraries and traditional libraries are very different, yet in other ways they are remarkably similar. People still create information that has to be organized, stored, and distributed, and they still need to find and use information that others have created. An underlying theme of this book is that no aspect of digital libraries can be understood in isolation or without attention to the needs of the people who create and use information. Although the book covers a wide range of technical, economic, social, and organizational topics, the focus is on the actual working components of a digital library.
Publishers who have books that they wish to be considered for review should send two (2) copies directly to the Book Review Editor:
Efthimis N. Efthimiadis
Associate Professor
The Information School
University of Washington
Box 352840
Seattle, WA 98195-2840
Tel: (206) 616-6077; Fax: (206)
616-3152
Email: efthimis@u.washington.edu
Updated November 26, 2001