This book introduces a new approach to designing E-Librarian Services. With the help of this system, users will be able to retrieve multimedia resources from digital libraries more efficiently than they would by browsing through an index or by using a simple keyword search. E-Librarian Services combine recent advances in multimedia information retrieval with aspects of human-machine interfaces, such as the ability to ask questions in natural language; they simulate a human librarian by finding and delivering the most relevant documents that offer users potential answers to their queries.

本书介绍了一种设计电子图书馆员服务的新方法。在这个系统的帮助下，用户将能够比通过索引浏览或使用简单的关键字搜索更有效地从数字图书馆检索多媒体资源。电子图书馆员服务将多媒体信息检索的最新进展与人机界面方面相结合，如用自然语言提问的能力；他们通过查找和交付最相关的文档来模拟人类图书管理员，这些文档为用户的查询提供了潜在的答案。