An Overview of Results from Rutgers' Investigations of Interactive Information Retrieval
Nicholas J. Belkin · Illinois Digital Environment for Access to Learning and Scholarship (University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign) · 1998
Over the last four years, the Information Interaction Laboratory at Rutgers' School of Communication, Information and Library Studies has performed a series of investigations concerned with various aspects of people's interactions with advanced information retrieval (IR) systems. We have been especially concerned with understanding not just what people do, and why, and with what effect, but also with what they would like to do, and how they attempt to accomplish it, and with what difficulties. These investigations have led to some quite interesting conclusions about the nature and structure of people's interactions with information, about support for cooperative human-computer interaction in query reformulation, and about the value of visualization of search results for supporting various forms of interaction with information. In this discussion, I give an overview of the research program and its projects, present representative results from the projects, and discuss some implications of these results for support of subject searching in information retrieval systems.