The use of the SIR database in design and technology

The availability of information within our society is an issue that has occupied much thought in recent years and has led to dramatic structural changes in the nature of work for a range of occupations from the medical to the City professions. Some of the most profound effects of this increased availability have been witnessed in the field of design where the manipulation of information has underpinned much of its activities. Various journals have sought to reflect this interest and to explore the role that information retrieval has to play in modern commercial practice, but it is only in recent years that this debate has extended into the sphere of design education. The reduction in hardware costs has facilitated the introduction into schools of sophisticated information retrieval systems such as databases designed to run on microcomputers, and this paper seeks to explore the functioning of one such prototype system.