README

  The files in this directory contain the LISA collection as provided by Peter
Willett of Sheffield University.  They are NOT TO BE SOLD but are being provided
to support research investigations.  For ease of manipulation, the document
collection is broken up into a number of files that should be concatenated
together to yield the full set.
  The LISA collection was sent in messages with headers like
those at the bottom of this file.
  There are 6004 documents and 35 queries with relevance
judgements. - Ed Fox

The Library and Information Science Abstracts database is
   Copyright (c) 1982 Library Association

-------------more information about collection, taken from letter----------

Comments from a 28 June 1988 letter from Dr. Peter Willett,
Snior Lecturer in Information Science, Department of Information Studies,
The University of Sheffield, Sheffield S10 2TN, ENGLAND
Telephone: (0742) 768555, x. 6012
Fax: (0742) 739826
Email: LI1PBW%PRIMEA.SHEFFIELD.AC.UK@CUNYVM.CUNY.EDU

"I am enclosing a copy of a test collection which we have developed here based 
on the 1982 Library and Information Science Abstracts database (6004 documents
for which we have extracted just the title and abstract fields).  There are 35
natural language queries which were obtained from students on our MSc course in
1983; these were searched for in all of the printed versions of LISA (not quite
exhaustively but the student in question did spend about 6 weeks doing nothing 
else but sitting in the library surrounded by LISA issues!).  These manual 
searches were supplemented by extensive online searches; I would guess that 
probably 80% of the relevant documents have been identified.

I also enclose a copy of the correspondence which I had with Nick Moore at the
Library Association, who provided the original data.  Is this acceptable to you
for your copyright purposes - I am assuming that the disc will have some 
statement about not selling the data etc etc."

------------sample msg from person sending files-----------
Date:     Thu, 27 Oct 88 12:21:28 GMT
From:     LI1IGH@PRIMEA.SHEFFIELD.AC.UK
To:       foxea@VTCC1

Dr. Fox,

Hopefully, you will be receiving the Sheffield LISA test collection
along with this note. I don't know what went wrong with the version we
sent on tape; this one looked ok when it left here.

Please let me, or Peter Willett, know if anything unexpected happens to it
in transit..
                            Steve Wade
                            (Research Assistant)