Some members of Congress are proposing a bottom-up approach to determine which programs merit cutting. The idea is to draft cost-cutting legislation based on aggregating citizens’ opinions on what should be cut and what should be kept. One of the targets of this approach is the NSF, or, more precisely, the merits of some of the research funded by the NSF. The premise is that watchdog citizens will identify research that isn’t worth funding and will bring this to the attention of the House Committee on Science and Technology. The members of the committee, will, then, presumably, take action to save the taxpayers’ money.

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It’s my pleasure to announce that the final report to the NSF on the workshop on Information Seeking Support Systems (ISSS) so ably organized by Gary Marchionini and Ryen White has been published. The report covers many aspects that define this research area and distinguish it from both Information Retrieval and Human-Computer Interaction fields.

Three kinds of challenges are defined and preliminary steps toward meeting the challenges are presented in this report: robust models of human‐information interaction; new tools, techniques, and services to support the full range of information seeking activities; and techniques and methods to evaluate information seeking across communities, platforms, sources, and time. Special attention is given to collaborative information seeking and the need for industry‐academic collaboration.

It was a wonderful experience to have two days of discussion of these and other topics with so many smart people, and I am happy to have contributed to the workshop organization and to the writing of the report. Finally, I am delighted that collaborative information seeking is featured as an important aspect of the field. We hope that this report will inspire others to take on the outstanding challenges and will encourage the NSF to understand the significance of this work for our society.