PARTIAL COORDINATION - II - A PRELIMINARY EVALUATION AND FAILURE ANALYSIS

Partial coordination is a new method for cataloging documents for subj ect access. It is especially designed to enhance the precision of docu ment searches in online environments. This article reports a prelimina ry evaluation of partial coordination that shows promising results com pared with full-text retrieval. We also report the difficulties in emp irically evaluating the effectiveness of automatic full-text retrieval in contrast to mixed methods such as partial coordination which combi ne human cataloging with computerized retrieval. Based on our study, w e propose research In this area will substantially benefit from a comm on framework for failure analysis and a common data set. This will all ow information retrieval researchers adapting ''library style'' catalo ging to large electronic document collections, as well as those develo ping automated or mixed methods, to directly compare their proposals f or indexing and retrieval. This article concludes by suggesting guidel ines for constructing such a testbed.