Intelligent Information Retrieval

Since it was first announced at ADASS 2 the Smithsonian/NASA Astrophysics System Abstract Service (ADS) has played a central role in the information seeking behavior of astronomers. Central to the ability of the ADS to act as a search and discovery tool is its role as metadata agregator. Over the past 13 years the ADS has introduced many new techniques to facilitate information retrieval, broadly defined. We discuss some of these developments; with particular attention to how the ADS might interact with the virtual observatory, and to the new myADS-arXiv customized open access virtual journal. The ADS is at http://ads.harvard.edu