The Relevance of Feedback Mechanisms to Library Databases in Academic Libraries

Abstract

This chapter studies the relevance of the feedback mechanism on the library database in academic libraries. The study is a systematic literature review which uses Kitchenham and Charters methodology. The chapter has three objectives, which are to enumerate the concept of information retrieval and its problems and the relevance of feedback mechanism to the database in academic libraries. The findings indicated that feedback is very important in the information retrieval systems most especially in relation to the database in an academic library. The contributions of this chapter show that the feedback mechanism is relevant to information retrieval. It also creates awareness among librarians of the importance of these mechanisms and encouraged them to seek for a database with these components whenever they want to buy a new database for their various institutions. The chapter, however, recommends further empirical studies on the subject matter.