Relevance and Information Behavior.

Abstract

The author's treatment of relevance is restricted to relevance as its relates to the behavior of humans in seeking and using information rather tha it relates to the behavior of humans in seeking and using information rather in evalating retrieval systems's performance. The author views relevance as a manifestation of human information behavior and excludes work that views relevance only as a matching or computational functions of IR systems. The chapter is divides into five major sections plus an introduction and conclusion: IR Interaction model; terminology of relevance from three points of view: the system view, the information view, and thes situation view. There is an ongoing controversy about relevance, whether it be semantic or substantive. The term is frequently confused with topicality or satisfaction. As Schamber reviews the work of others she clarifies their uses of the term for the reader