information such as facts or pointers to rich information resources are well met. However, support for the more difficult challenges of information seeking is not provided by the current search engines. There are only a few models of human behavior or practical support tools for open-ended, exploratory, discovery-oriented, or recall-oriented tasks that depend as much on results examination and interpretation as on query specification. Meeting the needs of people who seek information to discover and learn is a grand challenge, and the tools and services needed to meet this challenge will be fundamental to the emerging cyberinfrastructure. The time and conditions are right to develop the theory, techniques, and tools to support such information seeking needs. This two-day workshop aims to bring together leaders in information retrieval, library and information science, and human-computer interaction to shape the short- and long-term agenda for research to support information seeking. In particular the workshop focuses on the following three themes: (i) Understanding / modeling exploratory search behavior; (ii) Providing system support for exploratory search; and (iii) Evaluating systems to support exploratory search.
This workshop will have impact on the emerging information seeking research and development community by defining directions for short, mid, and long-term research. Workshop results will be widely disseminated via the workshop website (www.ils.unc.edu/ISSS_workshop/). It can be foreseen that general population of WWW users will benefit from this effort, as better tools and services to support information needs for ongoing work and learning will be developed. These results will also impact diversity in the IT research and development area by opening up this area to underrepresented students, researchers and practitioners.
