Multimedia Information Retrieval

Preface

Never before could it be said that the purpose of librarianship as a profession is at a turning point.

Traditionally, we have dealt with managing physical objects (documents) and only marginally did our attention wander to their content; it was enough to describe them and make them available. From this point of view, Robert Musil drew a fine, almost caricatured profile of the librarian: ‘the secret of a good librarian’ – he writes in The Man Without Qualities – ‘is that he never reads any of the literature in his charge other than the title and the table of contents. Anyone who lets himself go and starts reading a book is lost as a librarian!’ However, in the digital universe, distinctions between the content and the document that conveys ...