The growth of the Internet and the availability of enormous volumes of
data in digital form have necessitated intense interest in techniques to
assist the user in locating data of interest. The Internet has over 350
million pages of data and is expected to reach over one billion pages by
the year 2000. Buried on the Internet are both valuable nuggets to
answer questions as well as a large quantity of information the average
person does not care about. The Digital Library effort is also
progressing, with the goal of migrating from the traditional book
environment to a digital library environment. The challenge to both
authors of new publications that will reside on this information domain
and developers of systems to locate information is to provide the
information and capabilities to sort out the non-relevant items from
those desired by the consumer. In effect, as we proceed down this path,
it will be the computer that determines what we see versus the human
being. The days of going to a library and browsing the new book shelf
are being replaced by electronic searching the Internet or the library
catalogs. Whatever the search engines return will constrain our
knowledge of what information is available. An understanding of
Information Retrieval Systems puts this new environment into perspective
for both the creator of documents and the consumer trying to locate
information.