Supporting multiple information-seeking strategies in a single system framework

This study explores issues in information retrieval (IR) systems with special attention to information-seeking strategies (ISSs), the relation of ISSs to IR system design, and how to support multiple ISSs within a single system framework. It addresses the observation that people engage in a variety of ISSs within a single information-seeking episode. This study proposes to construct and evaluate an interactive IR (IIR) system which incorporates different IR support techniques to adaptively support multiple ISSs. Based on an information-seeking episode model (Belkin, 1996), and a multi-faceted classification scheme of information behaviors (Cool & Belkin, 2002), it was conducted in a series of three consecutive steps. Firstly, four experimental systems were designed and implemented with each tailored to one of the following IR support techniques: database summary, clustered retrieval results, table of contents navigation, and fielded query. A within-subjects experiment was conducted to compare each experimental system to its respective generic baseline system, which was constructed by following the iii current standard model with a specific query input and a ranked list of search results