Does anyone happen to know if any of the pre-TREC test collections are available? I'm thinking of the CACM collection, for instance, or indeed of the original Cranfield test collection itself. Hosting and distributing these collections must be a pretty minor load by current standards; it would be great (for an IR history enthusiast like myself, at least) to have them available online; but perhaps there are copyright issues involved.
Tags: test collections
You could find the CACM collection on the campion website for Croft et al.'s new textbook in IR: http://www.search-engines-book.com/collections/ . But I don't know whether it could be further distributed in one way or another.
Fantastic, thanks for that!
Try the Glasgow group's site: http://ir.dcs.gla.ac.uk/resources/test_collections/
Oh, superb. Thanks very much. It's funny that modern search engines are not very good at finding old test collections...