Boolean Operator in Logical And Efficient information Retrieval

Abstract

Entitle BOOLEAN OPERATOR IN LOGICAL AND EFFICIENT INFORMATIONRETRIEVAL database searching and Web searching became the most popular activitieson the local and remote login, information retrieval (IR), which was performed mainly byprofessionals, researchers,now is an activity that every user on the Web is engaged in.The growing interest in general user's database searching and Web searching abilitynaturally leads to the awareness that some kind of guidance is needed. Since IR on thedatabase or Web has many similarities with traditional IR, IR skills of retrievinginformation have been adopted to teach general users how-to search or about retrievinginformation from the Web. Two major concerns regarding users’ behavior are frequentlyfound: the queries tend to be short, and Boolean operators are insufficiently used instructuring queries.Drawing on the social informatics view of IR and the semantic Web research, this thesisfirst argues that short queries have unique values in database searching and Websearchingbecause OR and NOT operators shows grater effectiveness upto two keywordsamong the both user groups. It also argues that using Boolean operators is an effectivestrategy in database searching and Web searching. Because Web searching is generallymotivated by knowledge discovery purpose, high recall and precision is not as importantas it is in small databases, so database searching become more sophisticated with Booleanoperators. The study also discusses the tradeoffs between the benefits of operator usewith enhanced search interfaces and the time and effort that users need to exert to use thefeatures. The study mainly focuses the information seeking behavior of library professionals, M.Lib. Sc. Students, general users of university level, and researcher. Their behavior or skillmeasured with the help of questionnaires on the basis of their personal knowledge andexperience. Therefore BOOLEAN OPERATOR IN LOGICAL AND EFFICIENTINFORMATION RETRIEVAL study highlights the skills and abilities of potential andnovice users. For this study data has been collected from four main librariesviz: TUCL,ICIMOD, SSBL, and KUSOM their professionals and usershave taken as the source ofinformation. Total 24 questions were formulated to evaluating their skills of coordinatingthe keywords and their techniques of implementing Boolean logical operators forsuccessful query formulation. Total 63% and 48% of professionals and general usersrespectively were used Boolean operators while they navigating and it meets itshypothesis. In similar investigation total 65% professionals feel Boolean operators areuser friendly and rest 35% not feels so. Similarly only 41% general users feel it userfriendly whereas 59% general user not so.Five search tasks associated with TUCL onlinedatabase has been presented to fill-up in each questionnaire,only 115 respondents wereparticipated out of 150. The respondents so selected provided 115 172535 searchresults. After completion of search the output results as obtained by two broad usergroups were compared with the result as obtained by database expertise for the relevanceassessment. Total value obtained by two (2) broad user groups, professionals and generalusers to their five (5) titles, corresponding to three (3) Boolean operators i.e. total 30352  Chi-Square( 2 )test was used as the significance of the study.Conclusionand recommendations has been drawn on the basis of this analytical and exploratory study. It finally discusses the carryover of user's information behaviors across different kinds ofthe digitized library or automated library database or Web, and the effects of the strongcommercial forces which spur the need for sophisticated IR skills in shaping user'sinformation habits. It concludes that a different model based on the social cognitiontheories and practical is needed to approach general user's problems with informationretrieval on the database and Web. Ramesh PrajuliCentral Department of LibraryandInformation Science,T.U. Kirtipur.