Overview

In this relatively new course, students will learn about the nature of information, its structure and use. "Information" today is dominated, in most people's minds, by electronic information, but the course will emphasize that print sources, libraries and information specialists are also important. In this course students will generate, structure, retrieve and evaluate electronic and print information. Use the informational and resource links at the left to get to important information about the course. This site will be updated from time to time and you will be notified by the course mailing list and the revision date above.

Though your primary resource will be the course textbook, other major sources will be used, including books on reserve, books online, other Information Retrieval course websites. As a major part of your work, you will be reading, analyzing and reporting on papers in the ACM SIGIR conference proceedings over the last few years (SIGIR = Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval). Some of you may do programming projects also, using Java and possibly, Perl.

News and Notes

6 April 2004: Final Exam information Follow the Exam Information link on the left and from there, the link to information about the Final.

16 February 2004: YOUR SEMESTER PROJECT Your project will involve Java programming or possibly a written paper. See the Projects link.

16 February 2004: The Midterm will be on March 11th; see the Exam Information link. There is a new assignment involving reading papers; see the Assignments link. You'll be responsible for these on the Midterm.

28 January 2004: Quiz #1 will be on Monday, February 2nd. It will cover the Boolean and Vector models. Information is available through the Exam information link on the left or directly here.

21 January 2004: The reading assignments through to the end of next week, January 29th, can be found on the Syllabus/Schedule page.

14 January 2004: The full details of the SIGIR paper assignment have been posted, and are available here.

11 January 2004: This site is very much in the development stage as I adapt and augment existing material. (Some of the material from an earlier version of this course may apply, a good bit of it will not.) Any link to the left that is in parentheses is not yet available.