In the situations which lead to information-seeking behaviors, our interactions with texts often take place within the context of systems, social and technical, which are constructed to support us in accomplishing the goals of the behaviors. Such systems include, for instance, libraries, information centers, advisory services, and information retrieval (IR) systems. In this paper, we are concerned explicitly with the issue of how one might best characterize the IR problem, and IR systems, in order to support people in their information-seeking behaviors most effectively.