SIG/ED-RESEARCH OPPORTUNITIES IN INFORMATION SCIENCE: CURRENT RESEARCH, SOURCES OF FUNDING, AND PROSPECTIVE RESEARCH AREAS

摘要

A number of major operational public-access information retrieval (IR) systems, such as the University of California's MELVYL online catalog, the CARL system in Colorado, and OCLC's EPIC service, are available nationally.rnAmbitious new systems, such as OLIS in Ohio, are being planned. In the next few years, these systems will merge with the national computer networks (such as NREN, the planned National Education and Research Computer Network) in increasingly complex ways, as they evolve into information servers in a distributed computing environment. These systems offer a cornucopia of research opportunities: traditional academic research (including fertile ground for doctoral dissertation studies), joint University-industry partnerships with hardware and software vendors, information providers, and computer networking groups for advanced research and development, and novel types of multi-institutional studies. The organizations developing, operating, and refining the major systems today are frequently overwhelmed by the number of potential research projects. They are eager to seek partnerships with researchers. The potential areas of research in these environments include database statistics, system performance, user behavior and usage, and policy studies. As IR systems develop in the networked environment, exciting new issues will require increased attention, including the development of effective directories of IR systems and information resources, metadata for databases, database management support for IR systems, network protocols (such as 239.50 and its extensions), image databases, retrieval and transmission of images and other multi-media data, exploitation of highly parallel hardware, graphical interfaces in a network environment, and resource management in public access systems.