RELEVANCE RECONSIDERED - TOWARDS AN AGENDA FOR THE 21ST-CENTURY - INTRODUCTION TO SPECIAL TOPIC ISSUE ON RELEVANCE RESEARCH

The publication of this issue marks a special event for the Journal of the American Society for Information Science: the introduction of spe cial topics issues. It seems appropriate that the first issue is devot ed to the topic of relevance, acknowledged as the most fundamental and much debated concern for information science, it being the tacit or e xplicit judgment of end-users about the output of information retrieva l systems. Early on, information scientists recognized that the concep t of relevance was integral to information system design, development, and evaluation. However, there was little agreement as to the exact n ature of relevance and even less that it could be operationalized in s ystems or for the evaluation of systems. While this lack of agreement continues to an extent at the present, some common understandings have developed, and these are reflected in the papers in this issue.