Research in information retrieval has been ongoing for over forty years, but many unsolved problems still plague us. This talk will start with some history on the origins of current information retrieval technology, and then will move into some analysis of the various work done in TREC over the past ten years. The emphasis will be on evaluation, along with what has been learned, and not learned, in the various tasks encompassed in TREC.

Donna Harman graduated from Cornell University and has been involved with research in new search engine techniques for many years. She currently heads a group at the National Institute of Standards and Technology working in the area of natural language access to full text, both in search and browsing modes. In 1992 she started the Text Retrieval Conference (TREC), an ongoing forum that brings together researchers from industry and academia to test their search engines. She received the 1999 Strix Award from the U.K Institute of Information Scientists for this effort.