Preface

This volume contains the papers presented at the CHIIR 2017 workshop Sup-
porting Complex Search Tasks (SCST 2017) held on March 11, 2017 at the Oslo
and Akershus University College, in Oslo, Norway.
    The workshop addresses many open research questions relating to complex
search tasks: What are the obvious use cases and applications of complex search?
What are essential features of work tasks and search tasks to take into account?
And how do these evolve over time? With a multitude of information, varying
from introductory to specialized, and from authoritative to speculative or opin-
ionated, when to show what sources of information? How does the information
seeking process evolve and what are relevant differences between different stages?
With complex task and search process management, blending searching, brows-
ing, and recommendations, and supporting exploratory search to sensemaking
and analytics, UI and UX design pose an overconstrained challenge. How do we
know that our approach is any good?
    Supporting complex search task requires new collaborations across the whole
field of IR, and the workshop is one step in bringing together a diverse group of
researchers to work together on one of the greatest challenges of our field.
    The workshop program contains a diverse set of papers covering many as-
pects of search. There were 11 submissions. Each submission was reviewed by at
least 3 program committee members. The committee decided to accept 9 papers
(acceptance rate 81%). The program also includes two invited keynote talks by
Mark Hall (Edge Hill University) and Jussi Karlgren (Gavagai and KTH Royal
Institute of Technology).
    We thank the program committee members for their timely and constructive
reviews. We gratefully acknowledge the support of EasyChair for organizing
paper submission and reviewing and producing the proceedings.


March 3, 2017                                                     Marijn Koolen
Amsterdam                                                          Jaap Kamps
                                                                   Toine Bogers