Traditionally information retrieval has been the concern of only a select few, manly people engaged in knowledge-intensive activities such as education and research and who have therefore required access to data in various forms (predominantly digital). However, in today’s world we use information retrieval systems in almost every aspect of our daily lives: retrieving an e-mail message received or sent on a specific date, to a specific person; finding something or someone on the web; searching a library book in an online library catalogue or in a digital library; searching for a song or finding a video on YouTube; and so on.

This proliferation of information retrieval not only in specific knowledge-intensive activities but also in our daily activities has brought new sets of challenges as well as opportunities, and these have resulted in a tremendous amount of research and development activities n information retrieval.

While the main aim of this course is to provide a blend of traditional and new approaches to information retrieval. The primary audience of this course is comprising the students of library and information science students.