Originally meant as an introductory text, Foskett’s book is “concerned with a discussion of the problems of optimizing our responses to requests for information on subjects.” The optimization of subject requests is explored through “state of the art” techniques. Unfortunately the “state of the art” techniques were created no later than 1982, and much of what is discussed is not new or revolutionary in the context of today’s “state of the art”. Many theories (such as recall and precision ) are still relevant, but the technologies discussed for searching and document retrieval are almost universally out of date. This is most evident in the final chapter, which evaluates the information retrieval system projects that were current at the time of publication (of the fourth edition). This includes research projects on indexing efficiency (the 1957 Aslib Cranfield research project , for example). Although these projects are still relevant because they influenced much of the work that has made library science what it is today, it is no longer a topical evaluation of the future of library science technologies.
In spite of its lack of currency, overall the work is approachable and comprehensive. It takes the time to define library terms that are helpful to new users (heuristic vs. iterative, for example). One of the most interesting analogies in the book is the early-noted theory of information retrieval as a form of communication. In this analogy, the indexing process is considered encoding and the searching is considered decoding . This is an excellent analogy for the relationship between indexer and searcher and is a good example of how Foskett attempts to make information retrieval accessible to beginners. ( )