The Beginning of Information Retrieval

Human brain structures and organizes the information received in order to retrieve information easily at another point in time. Information Retrieval, perhaps one of the oldest disciplines in Information Technology and Science, was most likely first defined by Mooers (1950):

“Information retrieval is the name of the process or method whereby a prospect user of information is able to convert his need for information into an actual list of citations to documents in storage containing information useful to him.”

One of the main goals of information retrieval is to promote easier access and facilitate search abilities of the information stored within a system. Initially, researchers mainly investigated laboratory framework, also known as system-oriented research (Jarvelin, 2007). In system-oriented research, the main metrics of measurements are precision and recall of the systems. In other words, the user never initiates retrieving information.