Invading the fortress: how to besiege reinforced information bunkers

Information retrieval (IR) research has been very active over the last decades to develop approaches that allow machine indexing to significantly improve indexing practice in libraries. However due to practical limitations, this technology, is not often used in large-scale libraries. We propose a mix of existing technologies and new ideas to enable traditional libraries to adopt modern IR technology and to offer improved services to their customers, while leveraging their existing infrastructure and legacy databases.