SIGIR Digital Museum of Information Retrieval Research

ACM SIGIR presents the first results of a project to digitize the older literature in the information retrieval field. So far 14 of the old reports, such as the Cranfield reports and the SMART reports have been scanned, along with Karen Sparck Jones's Information Retrieval Experiment book. The PDF versions of these are available from the SIGIR Digital Museum of Information Retrieval Research. The museum provides room for exhibits, and allows searching of the material using the PF/Tijah XML search system.

The complete library is available for download on request. Requests can be directed to the SIGIR Information Director by sending an email to infodir_sigir@acm.org. See also:

Donna Harman and Djoerd Hiemstra. "Saving and Accessing the Old IR Literature". SIGIR Forum 42(2), pages 19-24, December 2008.

In my humble opinion, this is a beautiful resource. You can even read the Rocchio thesis and you will be able to cite his relevance feedback algorithm having read it from the very source!

Very nice, add it to your bookmarks (next to the ACL Anthology), and send it to your students!