This book builds a much‐needed bridge between user‐centred research and system‐centred research in the field of information retrieval. Although it is accepted that these two branches of information research are interlinked, it is not often that one finds a book that addresses both and elicits the continual interdependence between the two. This book is highly relevant in understanding any information interaction between a system and a user, and especially relevant now when all of our ubiquitous everyday technologies serve as information retrieval devices by default.
With an excellent and succinct Foreword by Tefko Saracevic, the book makes a very clear and valid case for why researchers need to consider the interactions between the user and the system, whether they are studying, researching, or working in the field of information seeking, information behaviour, or information retrieval.
The first chapter provides a very informative historical background of information seeking by Colleen Cool and Nicholas Belkin that traces the connections between the empirical human‐centred and the experimental system‐centred research in such a way that researchers from either side can easily see where their individual research fits in within the larger scope of this field. It also functions as an excellent literature review of this intersecting research space.
The chapter on information behaviour and seeking by Peiling Wang mostly concentrates on the historical information seeking models and theories while pointing the reader to Fisher, Erdelz and McKechnie's Theories of Information Behavior for the more contemporary information behaviour research. This is understandable because this field, although it uses the most human‐centred approaches within the larger discipline, is also the widest and most varied and cannot be covered in one chapter.
Elaine Toms' chapter on task‐based searching reveals how users' task‐based approaches can be coded and translated in a way that the system can process them, while Mark Smucker's excellent chapter on information representation details the similarities and differences in how humans and systems parse words and information and how these gaps can be addressed by various information organisation methods. Edie Rasmussen's chapter on access models is a very meaningful introduction to the field of computational retrieval, be it semantic analysis or data mining, and is written in a way that makes the ideas accessible even to those who are not in that area of research. Raya Fidel provides a good introduction to the various qualitative and quantitative research methods used in this field and details the strengths and weaknesses of both the experimental and the naturalistic methods of inquiry.
The other chapters expand on the basic ideas in this field and apply them to contemporary contexts of non‐text media and mixed media including images and multimedia. One notable chapter is the one on the role of recommendation, collaboration and social search by David Nichols and Michael Twidale that is highly relevant to all interactions in regard to information seeking, behaviour and retrieval where they extend the trope of the systems‐person interaction to a person‐person interaction, where the system is simply a medium or tool for this interaction. This is where the future of interactive information retrieval is leading us toward, and this chapter and this book in general are valuable tools in understanding this direction. One suggestion for future editions would be to extend these ideas to the realm of social and mobile information seeking, behaviour and retrieval.
As a teacher in the field of library and information sciences, I would highly recommend this book as a textbook for coursework students and as a reference book for research students. This book, in conjunction with Donald Case's Looking for Information and Peter Ingwersen and Kalervo Jarvelin's The Turn: Integration of Information Seeking and Retrieval in Context forms a perfect troika showcasing the best research in information seeking, behaviour and retrieval.
