Saving and Accessing the Old IR Literature

This short paper describes the beginnings of a project to digitize some of the older literature in the information retrieval field. So far 14 of the older reports, such as the Cranfield reports and ISR reports have been scanned, along with Karen Sparck Jones's Information Retrieval Experiment book. The PDF versions of these are available from the SIGIR web site, which includes a new "museum" of information retrieval that allows searching of this material and provides room for exhibits of historic interest. The paper finishes with some thoughts for future work on making more of our IR literature available for searching.