People , Interacting with Information 1

Recent recognition in IR that people engage in information seeking sessions; attempts to formally model search sessions; and, the move toward evaluation of IR systems over entire search sessions, are evidence of a new, broader understanding of IR's goals. This move takes IR's goal beyond identification of relevant information objects, to supporting people in achievement of the goal or task which led them to engage in information seeking. The emergence of the term, interactive information retrieval, the amount of research conducted under that rubric, and the lack of agreement about how to conduct and evaluate such research, testify to both the significance and the difficulty of addressing this new goal. In this new context, IR faces daunting challenges, including: understanding why people engage in information seeking; identifying aspects of that condition that need to be considered in supporting them in achieving their goals; designing support for evolving user goals and knowledge; and, perhaps most daunting, how to evaluate, in ways as rigorous and successful as IR evaluation has been to date, IR systems which attempt to address this broader goal. I, and others, have proposed that moving from relevance to usefulness as the main criterion for evaluation of IR system performance, could provide a basis for addressing many of these challenges. In this paper, I discuss how such a move might be implemented, some possible alternative means for addressing this broader goal for IR, and what serious attention to users of IR systems, and their interactions with information objects and systems, could mean for research and practice of IR.