A proposal of constructing educational document retrieval system was raised in 1976 for the celebration of centennial anniversary of the modern education system in Japan. The substantial study on a computerized retrieval system for educational documents, however, started in 1976 at Kyoto University of Education. In the first phase of development (1976-80), problems to be tackled were to accumulate educational documents in a computer, to process them by using the computer, and to extract keywords to be utilized in retrieving proper items from the data-base of the accumulated documents. For this purpose, 2,714 keywords were extracted from 1,693 titles of academic papers published in the fields of educational research, educational psychology and educational technology in Japan. It was recognized that these extracted words were not sufficient for the efficient retrieving of documents and appended by words extracted from three educational dictionaries. In the second phase of develoment (1981- ), members of Gifu University took devoted responsibities to collect a wider range of educational documents published in various fields of research and to construct the thesaurus of descriptors required for the efficient retrieving.
View full abstract