Yesterday I had the pleasure to attend a lecture at UCLA given by Peter Ingwersen, Professor of Information Retrieval and Seeking, Royal School of Library and Information Science, Denmark. Peter was the 2009/2010 recipient of the Contribution to Information Science & Technology Award from the Los Angeles chapter of ASIS&T, the 21st person to be so honored.  He gave an interesting talk on frameworks in information seeking which explored the philosophical foundations of the “Cranfield paradigm” and proposed ways of extending the approach to incorporate the behaviors of–gasp!–real users!

Drawing on material from his book (co-written with Kalervo Järvelin) “The Turn: Integration of Information Seeking and Retrieval in Context“, he described his “Spaceship” model

A general analytical model of information seeking and retrieval (from Information Research Vol. 10 No. 1, October 2004)

Professor of Information Retrieval and
Seeking, Royal School of Library and Information Science, Denmark

The model looks at a range of phenomena associated with information seeking, and represents them as nine different dimensions. (Full details are in the book; the a simplified version is available online). Unlike other models, it tries to capture collection-, system-, and user-related aspects. The breadth of scope is not without its challenges, as the model is necessarily vague and the set of resulting parameters is rather large. He identified a range of factors (facets) for each dimension, and offered the heuristic that experiments should not combine more than three at a time if their results are to be interpretable. The list of these factors was too long for me to capture in my notes, but should be available soon when his slides are posted online.  Stay tuned.

The talk was well presented and well-received. In addition to the technical content, his asides about well-known researchers had the audience chortling. Two of my favorites were comments about Gary Marchionini (“Gary says ‘taasks’ and not ‘tahsks’; you cannot understand what he is saying!”) and Dagobert Soergel (“I love the name Dagobert. You really feel the German forests.”) It should be noted that Gary was the 2007 recipient of the same award, and Dagobert was the 2008/2009 recipient.

Apparently, Peter has a knack for memorable quips. Jeremy reminded me of a speech Peter gave at the 2005 SIGIR reception, which he concluded with a “toast the spooks, without whom this field would not have relevance!” When I brought up the subject at dinner, he said that he’d had some to drink that night and wasn’t invited to give any more speeches.

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