Information Retrieval needs Human Communication

With "Major Problems in Retrieval Systems," Dr. Gholamreza Fadaie Araghi defines and states the importance of recall and precision, warns about trusting too much in information technology, and calls communication the most necessary element for retrieval of the right information for a request. This can be gleaned from the author's abstract of his 2005 article in the journal Cataloging & Classification Quarterly.

It's a dry read with some opinions that seemed to offensive my major, though it intended to warned about the same kind of blind trust in technology that so bothered Lanier. I've studied a bit of Human-Computer Interaction (HCI), and I agree that interface design is the beating heart of information retrieval in the modern era. A graphical-user interface (GUI) is the tool that connects the seeker of information to a variety of information. Depending on how well that is designed, which tends to correlate to the degree that the interface designer understands the purpose of the software to be built.

In a way, Araghi has really outlined what a librarian does today. He postulates "retrieval consultants," which themselves are a sort of human interface between the classification systems and the seeker of information. With the heuretic abilities of a human, such retrieval consultants inevitably outshine their program-running computer counterparts. When it comes to using the power of data mining, a human is necessary to harness it, to understand its strengths and weaknesses.