Interactive Information Seeking, Behaviour and Retrieval. Edited by Ian Ruthven and Diane Kelly. London: Facet publishing, 2011, 296 pp. $ 89.95 (paperback). (isbn: 978-1-85604-707-4)

This book is a must if one is a student or researcher new to information science and, in particular, to information retrieval (IR) interaction and multimedia research. It will be especially valuable to those interested in human factors of IR in a social search context combined with information representation, access and interaction techniques, interface and evaluation methodology issues, and Web-based or multimedia information behavior and retrieval interaction. It is edited by two internationally known representatives of the established generation of researchers: Associate Professor Diane Kelly, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, and Professor Ian Ruthven, University of Strathclyde, Scotland. They have invited an international crowd of 17 fellow highly experienced senior and younger researchers from academia and the information industry to contribute to this textbook collection of 13 chapters on recent advances on information–interaction themes. In scope, the book is primarily oriented toward students and researchers of information science; but it indeed has relevance for, and bearing upon, computer science and, in particular, students of human–computer interaction who wish to be introduced to the umbrella of interactive IR themes. Such issues are scarcely dealt with in TREC and traditional IR contexts even though Web IR necessarily involves interaction. As a topic, information-interaction research is also increasingly important to the online Web search industry. Clearly, information–interaction studies bridge laboratory-based IR and user-centered information (behavior) studies. It is fair to say that this book nicely supplements the Ingwersen and Järvelin (2005) research monograph on integration of information seeking and IR in context (2005) by adding interface, Web IR, social searching, and multimedia perspectives to the R&D agenda for systems design in a relevant and insightful way. Further, it connects indirectly to the two central biennial conferences, Information Seeking in Context (ISIC) and Information Interaction in Context (IIiX), where several of the authors frequently publish. The initial four chapters address human information behavior and seeking as well as task-based IR interaction, and how to carry out research on such issues. The following two chapters consider information representation or architecture in a broader sense: the system’s organization of information contents and the four families of common retrieval models (Boolean, probabilistic, vector space, and language models, labeled access models). Chapter 7 concentrates on search system and user-centered evaluation and relates to the earlier methodological data collection and analysis chapter. The book then moves into the center of interaction with two chapters: interface issues and interactive techniques. The former provides an extensive overview of interface types for retrieval and how they may support searching. The latter chapter shows how one can support information interaction by providing helpful tools and by learning about individual searchers’ interaction behavior. This serves as a kind of “personalization,” which is continued in the ensuing chapter on Web IR, ranking methods, and personalization issues. Here, we are meeting the challenges of Web-based IR interaction, for which solutions require new lines of attack. This chapter goes well with the next, on “recommendation, collaboration and social search.” This contribution considers the challenges to be met in research on social search behavior, and how knowledge of such behavior may support other searchers’ seeking processes, as a kind of social personalization. The last two chapters concentrate on multimedia information interaction (i.e., user behavior, interfaces, interaction, and representation as well as access models in relation to nontextual data such as Flikr, YouTube, and similar multimedia providers such as online museums). The foreword by Tefko Saracevic provides an intelligent and interesting perspective on the history of studies of information, information behavior, information seeking, and IR interaction. This novel, wider context for events also includes quantitative studies of information behavior such as bibliometrics and webometrics. The preface is remarkably short. In my opinion, the reader would appreciate a more extensive consideration, perhaps in the form of a more comprehensive introduction with respect to the combination and overlap of (the research on) information behavior, information seeking, IR interaction, and multimedia. Notwithstanding, Kelly and Ruthven introduce the motivation for the generation of the book, its structure, and the individual chapters in a stringent, purposeful, and on-point. Throughout this review, I provide very brief biographical data about the young contributors who as yet may be unfamiliar to some readers.