Book Reviews

Cruz Gil, Maria del Carmen. Applying an advanced information search and retrieval model in organisations: research and opportunities. Hauppauge, NY: Nova Publishers, 2022. 99 p. ISBN 978-3-68507-5606. $82.00. https://doi.org/10.52305/DCIN1587

The author of this small book is a Professor Maria del Carmen Cruz Gill who works at the Department of Documentation and History of Science at the University of Zaragosa. Her research profile is quite broad, spanning from records management to academic librarianship, business informatics, databases, and information retrieval. In this particular book, she is mainly looking into the models of information retrieval within organizations.

On the homepage of the book, the author explains that her mission is to spread the knowledge of information searching and retrieval research to those who are interested in it as an area of professional work or enter information science as a researcher. I would think, that the book will be helpful as an introduction to this area to the students on different levels in the first place. But I would be quite doubtful about the other reason that the author provides for writing this book: namely, the dispersion of the literature in different sources and making it easy to have an overview of it for interested persons. I would not argue this statement, but if a person is not capable of carrying out a proper search, then it is quite clear that he or she is not really interested in information search and retrieval and most probably will not need this book either. On the other hand, the overview in the book is quite specific and does not cover all models developed for various aspects of information retrieval.

The author has selected seven well-known models and introduced them by the names of their authors: Belkin's, Ingwersen's, Ellis's, Kuhlthau's, Wilson's, Dervin's and Byström's. It is slightly confusing the reader as almost all of these authors have developed more than one model. The author is focusing on the aspects of retrieval in the work of presented authors, but, for example, in the cases of Kuhlthau's and Dervin's models, the retrieval aspects are not quite clearly identified and explained.

In general, it seems that the author treats the terms of retrieval, search, and seeking as synonyms, or at least does not make clear distinctions between them. The final model is developed by Maria del Carmen Cruz Gill herself and represents information retrieval in organization as 'everything' from production to usage of information by people. However, I was not quite sure if this model was built on all previous models as their summary, or rather grown from the empirical studies of the author. The presented elements of the model have a form of the definitions of concepts and lack explanatory power.

The quality of the book suffers from the graphic presentation of the models. The fonts in the images are too small to read comfortably and sometimes even the lines and boxes are faded.

Nevertheless, one can see this book as a teaching aid used by university lecturers, though the price of a small paperback is far from affordable by those who could benefit by it.

Ona Norvaišaitė

Vilnius University, Lithuania
October, 2022

How to cite this review

Information Research is published four times a year by the University of Borås, Allégatan 1, 501 90 Borås, Sweden.