The book starts with Julian Warner’s declaration, “Information retrieval (IR) is of high contemporary significance, diffusing into ordinary discourse and everyday practice” (1). As a field, IR is concerned with the structured analysis, organization, storage, searching, and retrieval of information.¹ Emphasizing that we are faced with, and inevitably navigating in, an advanced, complex, differentially understood, and apparently chaotic arena fueled by information technologies, this nine-chapter volume provides a foundation on which to understand IR from a theoretical perspective. The author suggests that IR is constructed from labor, choice, and technology and is rooted in human experience. He aims to offer an inclusive understanding of IR systems through a labor-theoretic approach.

Reviewing existing evaluative traditions and indicating the possibility for synthesis within a labor-theoretic approach, the book assumes selection power as a quality of human consciousness. Selection power is produced by selection labor, a form of mental (informational) labor. According to Warner, selection labor comprises two processes: description labor and search labor. The former, an interpretive labor, is exemplified by cataloging, classification, and database description, which transform objects into searchable descriptions. The latter occurs when information systems are searched.

The centerpiece of the book is its fourth chapter titled “A Labor Theoretic Approach,” within which operating and realizing human selection power with respect to the real world is debated. Related issues, like retrieval from full text on the basis of semantic as well as syntactical foundations, are discussed, as are practical considerations for redesigning Internet search tools with a humanistic approach. The book’s concluding chapter reviews semantics and syntax in relation to preexisting theories relevant to IR, labor-theory approach, and existing and emerging real-world practices. The book includes a postscript, bibliography, list of supplemental readings, and index. Also helpful is the diagram on page 13, which delineates the book’s structure, illustrating the topics that relate to Warner’s labor theoretic approach.

The goal of the book is to enrich, promote, and advance IR research in the fields of information science and computer science. Warner’s concluding remarks suggest that every design in the field of IR should serve end users with simplicity, interoperability, and cost-effectiveness. It is hoped that such a humanistic approach can facilitate improving the interactive quality of IR systems.

Although this theoretical, scholarly, and inspiring work that balances practical and theoretical aspects of human IR is at times difficult to understand, its depth, value, and originality should not be neglected. It will be more interesting, erudite, instructive, and comprehensible for patient readers, be they students, professors, systems librarians, systems designers and optimizers, or researchers familiar with the IR field. I would have appreciated more attention given to the role of human behavior as it pertains to IR, especially given the book’s title. Nevertheless, Human Information Retrieval is a useful contribution to the IR literature.