摘要：One of the many excellences of this book is that it reaches beyond the bounds of its intended audience. Here is something which has a lot to say to the librarian at any level as well as to the specialist. Another of its excellences is that it tries to settle, once and for all, the vocabulary problem. For too long there has been a confusion in terms about the expression Information Retrieval, which has tended to receive the specialized meaning of "retrieval of plain text by means of a machine." Mr. Meadow takes it in its widest sense, namely -and in this world of increasing double-think, surprisingly-the retrieval of information. He shows that similar patterns of activity arise whether a user is trying to locate a book from a card catalog or a piece of information in a machine system, and this similarity helps us to understand some ways in which a manual system can be improved by learning from a machine system, and how a machine system can be understood by applying concepts which are already familiar to us. As the book advances, the author goes more fully into the purely machine problems, but always explaining them by traditional library methods.
