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Information Retrieval During The 1950s

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Chapter 1
1.1 Introduction
Information Retrieval
Information retrieval can be used in a broad term to mean physically bringing out what we have stored or kept earlier in order to use the information on it. For example, we have retrieved information when we retrieve our international passports from our pockets in order to copy the number on it into a form. It can also be described as the act of getting information, relevant to a need
As an academic field of study however, it can be defined as …”finding material…of an unstructured nature…that satisfies an information need from within large collections…”(C. Manning et al, 2008). This kind of information retrieval, used to be limited to a few people or professional searchers, as access to computers was limited at that time while the internet was not yet available. This however is no longer the case in the developed world as most people retrieve information by themselves when they search the web. The earliest form of computerised information retrieval began in the 1940s due to an increase in the production of scientific literature and availability of computers. This however was based on author, title and key words, rather than full text searches which came later. (Cleverdon, C.W. ACM press (1991).According to Mark Sanderson and W. Bruce Croft the capability of retrieval system grew as technology developed and processor speed and storage capacity increased. As the development of these systems led to movement away from manual

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