Supporting and Evaluating Whole-Session Interactive
                   Information Retrieval

                                               Nicholas J. Belkin
                                    School of Communication & Information
                                               Rutgers University
                                        New Brunswick, NJ 08901, USA
                                               belkin@rutgers.edu



                                                                session relate to and influence the success of a
                                                                search session. In this talk, I present a frame-
                       Abstract                                 work for addressing these issues, with special
                                                                reference to the problems of evaluation of sup-
    Information retrieval (IR) research and prac-               port for information seeking within, and over
    tice has traditionally been concerned with pro-             entire search sessions.
    viding information seekers with a response to
    a request for information, and the evaluation
    of how good that response has been. As is rec-
    ognized by this workshop, this “single-shot”
    approach to system support for information
    seeking, despite its successes, is inadequate in
    many ways as a model for support of informa-
    tion seeking in general. In particular, it ig-
    nores: that people interact with information
    objects during the course of information seek-
    ing episodes; that people have other goals dur-
    ing information seeking episodes than finding
    relevant documents; and, especially, that peo-
    ple do engage in information seeking episodes
    in what we might call search sessions. These
    conditions, which together have been under-
    stood to characterize what is called Interactive
    IR (IIR), require both new techniques for IIR
    support, and new methods and measures for
    evaluating such support. Both of these them-
    selves require a much better understanding
    of why people engage in information seeking;
    their goals during information seeking; how
    they attempt to achieve their goals and the
    problems that they face in doing so; and how
    their activities during an information seeking

Copyright c 2014 for the individual papers by the paper’s au-
thors. Copying permitted for private and academic purposes.
This volume is published and copyrighted by its editors.
In: U. Kruschwitz, F. Hopfgartner and C. Gurrin (eds.): Pro-
ceedings of the MindTheGap’14 Workshop, Berlin, Germany,
4-March-2014, published at http://ceur-ws.org