Task complexity, problem structure and information actions - Integrating studies on information seeking and retrieval

Analyzing actions to be supported by information and information retrieval (IR) systems is vital for understanding the needs of different types of inf ormation, search strategies and relevance assessments, in short, understand ing IR. A necessary condition for this understanding is to link results fro m information seeking studies to the body of knowledge by IR studies. The a ctions to be focused on in this paper are tasks from the angle of problem s olving. I will analyze certain features of work tasks and relate these feat ures to types of information people are looking for and using in their task s, patterning of search strategies for obtaining information and relevance assessments in choosing retrieved documents. The major claim is that these information activities are systematically connected to task complexity and structure of the problem at hand. The argumentation is based on both theore tical and empirical results from studies on information retrieval and seeki ng. (C) 1999 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.