be able to use information which can help us in problem management, etc. There is clearly a wide variety of such information seeking behaviors, such as asking a colleague for advice, browsing through journals to keep up-to-date, searching in a library for some specific information, and so on. It is important to note that, despite this range of forms that information-seeking behaviors take, they are all interactions with texts, and all share the general characteristics of such interactions, described in the previous paragraph.2
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.