From Information to Assistance

When Johnson was writing this, said libraries were very exclusive, inaccessible to most. When I was growing up the library was a favorite place to find information with the help of expert assistants, trained librarians. Nowadays, while libraries are still one of my favorite institutions, we have powerful digital information search, retrieval, and assemblage services, bundled into easily accessible tools at our fingertips. As information proliferates and human information needs remain high, information retrieval will continue to be a central area of investigation. We will also need better and better tools to access, assemble, and represent that information in ways that can be understood and applied-tools that ensure information turns into knowledge that is useful and used. In this talk, I will focus on how people find information, and how the tools we build aid in that finding. Using case studies, I will outline some that remain challenging, and offer some case studies and edge cases where more work is needed. I will share thoughts on how emerging assistant devices and services are and are not meeting the challenge of becoming expert information assistant