Documentary

Documentary

Documentary Scope in Legal Information Retrieval

The following is a basic concept of Documentary Scope in relation to information retrieval. In addition to this, Documentary Scope may be applied to legal texts, including case law, legislation and scholarly works. Documentary scope defines and describes the kinds of messages, texts, and documents a user can retrieve via an Information Retrieval database in terms of non-topical features, such as authorship or kinds of authors; media; codes and symbols systems used to encode messages as texts, including the various human languages used for creating language texts; the forms, formats, and genres of texts; the complexity or technical level of messages, including the kinds of audiences for whom they are intended (children, professionals, general public, etc.); points of view, biases, and methodological approaches characterizing the treatment of topics in messages; time and place of creation, manufacture or publication, etc.

Documentary Unit in Legal Information Retrieval

The following is a basic concept of Documentary Unit in relation to information retrieval. In addition to this, Documentary Unit may be applied to legal texts, including case law, legislation and scholarly works. A documentary unit is the portion of a document that can be directly retrieved by an Information Retrieval database. Documentary units may be complete documents, such as complete books, or complete periodical articles. Or they may be parts of complete documents — chapters in books, or paragraphs or charts or diagrams or illustrations in periodical articles. This same variety in the size of documentary units applies to all media. An Information Retrieval database for videotapes, for example, might retrieve only complete videotapes (so that the documentary unit is the complete tape), or it might be able to retrieve individual frames or short sequences of frames, in which cases, either the individual frames, or the short sequences of frames, constitute the documentary units. In all cases, the documentary unit is the unit that is analyzed for indexing (either by machine algorithm or by human inspection). Consequently, the documentary-unit is also called the unit-of-analysis. Bibliographic unit has also been used for this concept, indicating the unit described and retrievable via a bibliography. Small documentary units have also been called information units, but one should hope that all documentary units will be informative! See also indexable matter.


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