Marti Hearst‘s new book, Search User Interfaces, is out, as Daniel Tunkelang reported earlier. The book covers a range of topics related to interaction around information seeking, including topics such as design, evaluation, models of information seeking, query reformulation, etc. It also discusses emerging trends: Mobile Search Interfaces, Multimedia (although this field has arguably been around long enough to no longer be emerging), Social Search, and natural-language queries. The Social Search section discusses collaborative filtering, recommendation systems, and collaborative search, describing several systems along the full range of depth of mediation.

Marti’s book joins a parade of other recent publications related to information retrieval, including:

• The Geometry of Information Retrieval by C. J. van Rijsbergen (September 2004)
• The Turn: Integration of Information Seeking and Retrieval in Context (The Information Retrieval Series) Peter Ingwersen and Kalervo Järvelin (September 2005)
• Information Extraction: Algorithms and Prospects in a Retrieval Context (The Information Retrieval Series) by Marie-Francine Moens (October 2006)
• Text Information Retrieval Systems, Third Edition (Library and Information Science) by Charles T. Meadow, Bert R. Boyce, Donald H. Kraft, and Carol L Barry (March 2007)
• Introduction to Information Retrieval by Christopher D. Manning, Prabhakar Raghavan, and Hinrich Schütze (July 2007)
• Information Retrieval for Music and Motion by Meinard Müller (November 2007)
• Visualization for Information Retrieval (The Information Retrieval Series) by Jin Zhang (December 2007)
• Personalized Information Retrieval and Access: Concepts, Methods and Practices (Premier Reference Source) by Rafael Andres Gonzalez Rivera, Nong Chen, and Ajantha Dahanayake (April 2008)
• Latent Semantic Indexing and Information Retrieval by Johanna Geiß (April 2008)
• The Modern Algebra of Information Retrieval (The Information Retrieval Series) by Sándor Dominich (April 2008)
• Information Retrieval: A Health and Biomedical Perspective (Health Informatics) by William Hersh (November 2008)
• Statistical Language Models for Information Retrieval (Synthesis Lectures on Human Language Technologies) by ChengXiang Zhai (December 2008)
• Search Engines: Information Retrieval in Practice by Bruce Croft, Donald Metzler, and Trevor Strohman (February 2009)
• Law and the Semantic Web: Legal Ontologies, Methodologies, Legal Information Retrieval, and Applications (Lecture Notes in Computer Science / Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence) by Richard Benjamins, Pompeu Casanovas, Joost Breuker, and Aldo Gangemi (February 2009)
• Exploratory Search: Beyond the Query-Response Paradigm (Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval & Services) by Ryen White and Resa A. Roth (March 2009)
• (and of course)
  Faceted Search (Synthesis Lectures on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services) by Daniel Tunkelang (June 2009)

The list is quite ad hoc, and I am sure I missed more than one relevant title. But the point is that this is a field that is generating interest and (presumably) selling books. Search User Interfaces brings a welcome complementary perspective, focusing on interaction around information seeking rather than predominantly on the algorithms that facilitate the actual indexing and retrieval, which are well covered in the list above. I am also thrilled that the publishers saw fit to make it available online, as it will be an invaluable reference for prior work in this area.

Update: Daniel Tunkelang’s book is available now from the publisher.
Update: Fixed a bunch of HTML nonsense in the above list.