Conclusions and Future Directions

Abstract

The emergence of the Internet has allowed millions of people to use a variety of electronic information retrieval (IR) systems, such as digital libraries, Web search engines, online databases, and Online Public Access Catalogues (OPACs). The nature of IR is interaction. Interactive information retrieval is defined as the communication process between the users and the IR systems. However, the dynamics of interactive IR is not yet fully understood. Moreover, most of the existing IR systems do not support the full range of users’ interactions with IR systems. Instead, they only support one type of information-seeking strategy: how to specify queries by using terms to select relevant information. However, new digital environments require users to apply multiple information-seeking strategies and shift from one information- seeking strategy to another in the information retrieval process.