Humboldt-Universität zu Berlin - Berlin School of Library and Information Science

The evaluation of information systems encompasses quantitative and qualitative methods to assess the effectiveness, usability and usefulness of an information system. Information systems are defined here as systems, which collect, organize and represent information resources and make them accessible. Often, the evaluation is done in comparison with other information systems, which have similar goals or audiences. Information retrieval evaluation focuses particularly on the search functionalities of an information system. The research group develops system-oriented and target-oriented evaluation concepts, which can adopt a system-centric or user-centric perspective, and implements them using different methods.
Scientometrics and research evaluation is concerned with the structures of the research system. It studies how actors in the research system interact, which research topics are worked on with which intensity and how they are received. The research group collaborates on the development of standardized data collection tools such as the core data set on research activities and on the evaluation of research and information infrastructures.

Research on multilinguality in information systems includes at least three research areas: multilingual information access (MLIA), multilingual information retrieval (MLIR) and cross-language information retrieval (CLIR). MLIA, used as an umbrella term, considers all aspects of multilinguality in information systems including accessibility, search, retrieval and inspection of objects regardless of the user or content language. Multilingual information retrieval describes systems that provide multilingual query functionalities and / or content more precisely, whereas cross-lingual information retrieval (CLIR), as part of information retrieval research, focuses on the retrieval of documents in other languages than the query language.

Interactive Information Retrieval (IIR) investigates interactions between users, systems and information. In contrast to classical IR studies, IIR research includes the user side, asking questions related to the user's behavior and experiences. Consequently, IIR studies combine system aspects and user aspects in order to provide more comprehensive evaluations. IIR research is informed by several fields such as classic IR, HCI, behavioral science, library and information science, social sciences and psychology.

In digital libraries, metadata is essential to organize and retrieve information. Indexing objects in digital libraries with descriptive metadata is a great challenge because metadata needs to fit various different purposes and functionalities. Metadata is often aggregated from different sources making them heterogenous in language and schema. How to manage the heterogeneity to ensure interoperability and interlinking of (meta)data is one focus of this research group. Furthermore, we investigate the assessment of metadata quality and how quality for different functionalities can be improved.

Cultural heritage information systems aggregate and publish information about cultural objects or display them in digital form. Libraries, museums, archives and audiovisual archives provide these cultural heritage objects that are very heterogenous in their formats ranging from searchable text to pictures and 3D-models. Our research group studies how cultural information from various sources in heterogeneous formats and different languages can be accessed.

Cultural heritage information systems aggregate and publish information about cultural objects or display them in digital form. Libraries, museums, archives and audiovisual archives provide these cultural heritage objects that are very heterogenous in their formats ranging from searchable text to pictures and 3D-models. Our research group studies how cultural information from various sources in heterogeneous formats and different languages can be accessed.

Knowledge organization encompasses the methods and processes for processing, organizing, indexing and describing information resources in order to represent their subject matter or contents and other resource properties for search and access. The research group studies and evaluates the adequacy of knowledge organization systems for domain-specific use cases and the mapping between knowledge organization systems in order to ensure the interoperability between information systems.

Electronic Publishing, Open Access, Open Science, Research Data Management (RDM) and Information Management have been the focus of research and teaching at the Information Management department of Prof. Dr. Peter Schirmbacher until his retirement in February 2017. For the time being the research fields will be represented by Maxi Kindling at the Information Retrieval department. Please find further information on the former

Kindling, Maxi & Schirmbacher, Peter (2013) Die "digitale Forschungswelt" als Gegenstand der Forschung. In: IWP 64(2/3):127-136. DOI: 10.1515/iwp-2013-0017 (Postprint auf dem edoc-Server der HU Berlin)