University metadata and retrieval: The death of the library catalog?

Controlled vocabularies or languages are widely used in the field of information retrieval, but questions of whether they are necessary or more effective than free text searching have been unanswered. With the widespread use of free text searching in popular search engines, many in the information retrieval field have wondered how to make controlled vocabularies more useful or effective. Recent studies on this subject have revealed that while controlled vocabularies can produce more precise search results, user characteristics can potentially match those results in the right environment. These studies included a multitude of users from different backgrounds with different search environments. Some of the most important findings of these studies demonstrate that the skill of users and indexers can affect search outcomes just as much as controlled vocabularies.