Andrew Macfarlane - Böcker

th These proceedings contain the refereed papers and posters presented at the 28 Annual European Conference on Information Retrieval (ECIR 2006), which was held at Imperial College London in South Kensington between April 10 and 12, 2006. ECIR is the annual conference of the British Computer Society’s Inf- mation Retrieval Specialist Group. The event started its life as a colloquium in 1978 and was held in the UK each year until 1998, when the event took place in Grenoble, France. Since then the venue has alternated between the UK and Continental Europe. In the last decade ECIR has grown to become the major Europeanforumforthediscussionofresearchinthe?eldofinformationretrieval. ECIR 2006 received 177 paper and 73 poster submissions, largely from the UK (18%) and Continental Europe (50%), but we had many sub- missions from furthera?eldincludingAmerica(7%),Asia(21%),Middle EastandAfrica(2%), and Australasia (2%). In total 37 papers and 28 posters were accepted, and two papers were converted to posters. All contributions were reviewed by at least three reviewers in a double anonymous process and then ranked during a ProgrammeCommittee meeting with respectto scienti?c quality andoriginality. It is a good and healthy sign for information retrieval in general, and ECIR in particular, that the submission rate has more than doubled over the past three years. The downside, of course, is that many high-quality submissions had to be rejected owing to a limited capacity of the conference.

Information Retrieval has become a very active research field in the 21st century. Many from academia and industry present their innovations in the field in a wide variety of conferences and journals. Companies transfer this new knowledge directly to the general public via services such as web search engines in order to improve their information seeking experience.In parallel, teaching IR is turning into an important aspect of IR generally, not only because it is necessary to impart effective search techniques to make the most of the IR tools available, but also because we must provide a good foundation for those students who will become the driving force of future IR technologies.There are very few resources for teaching and learning in IR, the major problem which this book is designed to solve. The objective is to provide ideas and practical experience of teaching and learning IR, for those whose job requires them to teach in one form or another, and where delivering IR courses is a major part of their working lives.In this context of providing a higher profile for teaching and  learning as applied to IR, the co-editor of this book, Efthimis Efthimiathis, had maintained a leading role in teaching and learning within the domain of IR for a number of years. This book represents a posthumous example of his efforts in the area, as he passed away in April 2011. This book, his book, is dedicated to his memory.