Information Retrieval Research

Over the past five years, the Workshops in Computing series has provided a platform for state of the art research in a wide range of topics within computing science. As of 1996, the series has been published on-line - the aim being to make this important research material available in a more versatile and user-friendly format. Access to the on-line proceedings is obtained by purchasing an associated booklet of abstracts, which contains the text on which the password system is based. For a single initial payment, the user has unlimited access to the material for a period of ten years. Full details of the electronic Workshops in Computing series can be found on the WWW at: http://www. ewic. springer. co. uk/ This booklet provides the passwords needed to accesss the papers from the Proceedings of the 19th Annual Colloquium in Information Retrieval Research, which was held at Aberdeen University on 8-9 April 1997.