Improving Access to Information on the World Wide Web contains the text of
lectures delivered by Professor Carolyn Watters (Associate Dean, Faculty of
Graduate Studies, Dalhousie University) at the 26th Sarada Ranganathan Endowment
Lectures in Bangalore during March 2006. These lectures discuss three research
issues related to improving the effectiveness of the Web for information search
and retrieval. The first issue relates to understanding how information seeking
behavior has been affected by the omnipresent web browser. The second issue
relates to the support for complex web tasks that spread over multiple sessions.
The third issue relates to filtering web search results in ways that mirror the
job of