Information retrieval systems in scientific and technological libraries: from monolith to puzzle and beyond.

This contribution presents an overview of the evolution of the retrieval systems implemented in scientific and technological libraries to bring user to relevant information sources. We observe a growth in complexity, 1. starting from classical hard-copy catalogues over the monolith online public access catalogue 2. to a puzzle of software tools that try to cope with the growing complexity of the information sources and services offered by libraries 3. while the evolution is going on and pieces of the puzzle are still missing; so software developers and librarians may pay attention to these software tools for their future activities. More concretely we consider software systems 1. to improve the queries made by users, by expansion or refinement; 2. to cope with ambiguity of queries by categorizing search results in topical clusters; 3. to visualize data sets (information) in a map on the user's computer display to assist the user in analysing, interpreting, understanding, and eventually in decision making; such visualization tools can be applied to show and reveal for instance a. the characteristics of the collection(s) of data/ information sources that are made available to the user, b. the relations among words, terms, classification codes and so on, in the process of formulating and improving queries, c. some characteristics of the set of documents that results from a search query by a user. In conclusion: significant progress is still possible in the area of information retrieval tools offered by libraries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]