Nicholas J. Belkin is a professor at the School of Communication and Information at

Rutgers University Rutgers University (; RU), officially Rutgers, The State University of New Jersey, is a Public university, public land-grant research university consisting of four campuses in New Jersey. Chartered in 1766, Rutgers was originally called Queen's ...

. Among the main themes of his research are digital libraries; information-seeking behaviors; and interaction between humans and

information retrieval systems Information is an abstract concept that refers to that which has the power to inform. At the most fundamental level information pertains to the interpretation of that which may be sensed. Any natural process that is not completely random, ...

. Belkin is best known for his work on human-centered Information Retrieval and the hypothesis of Anomalous State of Knowledge (ASK). Belkin realized that in many cases, users of search systems are unable to precisely formulate what they need. They miss some vital knowledge to formulate their queries. In such cases it is more suitable to attempt to describe a user's anomalous state of knowledge than to ask the user to specify her/his need as a request to the system. Belkin was the chair of SIGIR in 1995-99, and the president of American Society for Information Science and Technology in 2005. In 2015, Belkin received the

Gerard Salton Award The Gerard Salton Award is presented by the Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval (SIGIR) every three years to an individual who has made "significant, sustained and continuing contributions to r ...

Biography

Nicholas Belkin studied Slavic

Philology Philology () is the study of language in oral and writing, written historical sources; it is the intersection of textual criticism, literary criticism, history, and linguistics (with especially strong ties to etymology). Philology is also defin ...

at the

University of Washington The University of Washington (UW, simply Washington, or informally U-Dub) is a public research university in Seattle, Washington. Founded in 1861, Washington is one of the oldest universities on the West Coast; it was established in Seattle a ...

, graduating in 1968. He graduated from the same college in

Library Science Library science (often termed library studies, bibliothecography, and library economy) is an interdisciplinary or multidisciplinary field that applies the practices, perspectives, and tools of management, information technology, education, and ...

2 years later (1970), and read his doctoral thesis in 1977 in the

University of London The University of London (UoL; abbreviated as Lond or more rarely Londin in post-nominals) is a federal public research university located in London, England, United Kingdom. The university was established by royal charter in 1836 as a degree ...

. He worked in the Information Science department of this university from 1975 to 1985. That year, he signed for the Faculty of Communication and Information at

(USA). He has been a visiting professor at

Western Ontario University The University of Western Ontario (UWO), also known as Western University or Western, is a public research university in London, Ontario, Canada. The main campus is located on of land, surrounded by residential neighbourhoods and the Thames Ri ...

(Canada) and

Free University of Berlin The Free University of Berlin (, often abbreviated as FU Berlin or simply FU) is a public research university in Berlin, Germany. It is consistently ranked among Germany's best universities, with particular strengths in political science and t ...

. He has been a visiting researcher at the

National University of Singapore The National University of Singapore (NUS) is a national public research university in Singapore. Founded in 1905 as the Straits Settlements and Federated Malay States Government Medical School, NUS is the oldest autonomous university in the c ...

in 1996. He has given more than 200 lectures around the world. He has been president of

Association for Computing Machinery The Association for Computing Machinery (ACM) is a US-based international learned society for computing. It was founded in 1947 and is the world's largest scientific and educational computing society. The ACM is a non-profit professional member ...

SIGIR (Special Interest Group on Information Retrieval) during the period 1995-1999, and president of the American Society of Information Science and Technology (ASIST) in 2005. Nicholas Belkin has served on numerous editorial boards of numerous scientific journals. Among the most prestigious are "Information Processing and Management" and "Information Retrieval".

Works

Nicholas Belkin has approached information retrieval from the so-called '' cognitive models '', that is, those focused on users who access document systems. Belkin approached his research from 3 basic lines: * Empirical studies on the behavior of the user who searches information. * The creation of expert systems models. * Design of interfaces friendly for the user. In 1977, Belkin read his thesis where he developed a new

theory A theory is a rational type of abstract thinking about a phenomenon, or the results of such thinking. The process of contemplative and rational thinking is often associated with such processes as observational study or research. Theories may be s ...

of the concept '' documentary information ''. This would be a structure that would allow the user to transform his '' anomalous state of knowledge '' (Anomalous State of Knowledge or ASK), when the need for information is satisfied, producing an adequate connection between the two ends of the documentary process: the producer and the receiver or user. For Belkin, the purpose towards which Documentation works is to make this effective communication possible, which would imply the study of documentary information in human and cognitive

communication Communication (from la, communicare, meaning "to share" or "to be in relation with") is usually defined as the transmission of information. The term may also refer to the message communicated through such transmissions or the field of inquir ...

systems, the connection between this information and its producer, the connection between information and user, gives the idea of the requested information and the effectiveness between information and

document A document is a written, drawn, presented, or memorialized representation of thought, often the manifestation of non-fictional, as well as fictional, content. The word originates from the Latin ''Documentum'', which denotes a "teaching" or ...

and its transmission process. Belkin concludes that the concept of documentary information is the combination of a cognitive

system, a structural representation of knowledge, the implementation of the project via user when he recognizes the need for information (ASK9, the meaning of the text ( message) and the interest in solving the problem of information science. This theory has also been developed by Oddy and Brooks. Nicholas Belkin proposed a novel cognitive model of information retrieval, referred to as '' 'episodic' ''. In this, Belkin defines a set of interactions that occur between the user and the system during the consultation to "conceptualize, label and transcribe the need for information, as well as make relevant judgments about one or more documents." The components would be the same as those used in the traditional model: navigation ( browsing), query (querying),

display Display may refer to: Technology * Display device, output device for presenting information, including: ** Cathode ray tube, video display that provides a quality picture, but can be very heavy and deep ** Electronic visual display, output devi ...

index Index (or its plural form indices) may refer to: Arts, entertainment, and media Fictional entities * Index (''A Certain Magical Index''), a character in the light novel series ''A Certain Magical Index'' * The Index, an item on a Halo megastru ...

ing, representation and matching. This model pays very little attention to the structure of documents and their retrieval, because it focuses on the anomalous state of knowledge of the individual, how to represent it, how to retrieve it, so it is based on the storage, retrieval and interaction of the search strategy.

Awards and published works

Nicholas Belkin has been awarded numerous times, obtaining in 2003 the ASIST Award for Academic Merit, and the

in 2015. Belkin has published numerous articles in the most prestigious magazines in the field of Information and Documentation, some awarded by the ASIST. He is also the author of the book: '' Interaction in Information Systems: A Review of Research from Document Retrieval to Knowledge- Based Systems '' (1985) co-authored with Alina Vickery.

References

External links

Nicholas J. Belkin's home page at Rutgers

{{DEFAULTSORT:Belkin, Nicholas J. American computer scientists Living people Rutgers University faculty 1942 births