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The article presents the author's views on the historical development of information infrastructures and the dissemination of knowledge. The author has published a number of historical studies examining utopian schemes for managing knowledge, the evolution of institutionalized or organizational aspects of information infrastructure, and the emergence of what he thinks of as an interdiscipline. The "Universe of Information: The Work of Paul Otlet for Documentation and International Organization" was an initial study of a hitherto neglected figure. A Russian translation of this book was published in 1977 and a Spanish edition in 1996. With the advent of the Internet and the Web, it has become clear how pioneering and important historically the work of Paul Otlet and his colleagues was. It seems yet even more relevant today with the recently announced agreement between Google and a number of research libraries to digitize and make their collections available through the Web. In Information Processing and Management, "Some Schemes for Restructuring and Mobilizing Information in Documents: A Historical Perspective," the author examines the utopian information management ideas of John Dury and Samuel Hartlib.

A knowledge map of digital library ( DL) research shows the semantic organization of DL research topics and also the evolution of the field. The research reported in this article aims to find the core topics and subtopics of DL research in order to build a knowledge map of the DL domain. The methodology is comprised of a four-step research process, and two knowledge organization methods (classification and thesaurus building) were used. A knowledge map covering 21 core topics and 1,015 subtopics of DL research was created and provides a systematic overview of DL research during the last two decades (1990-2010). We argue that the map can work as a knowledge platform to guide, evaluate, and improve the activities of DL research, education, and practices. Moreover, it can be transformed into a DL ontology for various applications. The research methodology can be used to map any human knowledge domain; it is a novel and scientific method for producing comprehensive and systematic knowledge maps based on literary warrant. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article attempts to reconstruct, from the material available to the author, the concept of the national system of scientific, technical, and organizational information in Poland. A new approach to the system was formally introduced in 1974 and is now a subject of extensive debate among Polish librarians and information specialists. The network might be of interest to some Western readers for its unique scope, and for its professional and political implications. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A definite need exists for an absolute and uniform means of comparison and evaluation of certain characteristics of various information retrieval systems. This paper is concerned only with the system's ability to satisfy queries; the effort and time used, and their relative costs, are not considered. Some past procedures that have been used are reviewed and discussed, along with some of the difficulties that arise when these procedures are followed. We present some desirable characteristics for a meaningful measure of effectiveness, then analyze in detail one such measure that may be used to compare the retrieval capabilities of a large variety of systems. This measure, called the "normalized sliding ratio," has a relation to the classical recall and precision ratios and may be looked on as a generalization of them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]