It is organized by the Information Retrieval Specialist Group of the British Computer Society (BCS-IRSG).
The event started its life as the Annual Colloquium on Information Retrieval Research in 1978 and was held in the UK each year until 1998 when it was hosted in Grenoble, France.
To mark the metamorphosis from a small informal colloquium to a major event in the IR research calendar, the BCS-IRSG later renamed the event to European Conference on Information Retrieval.
In recent years, ECIR has continued to grow and has become the major European forum for the discussion of research in the field of Information Retrieval.
Some of the topics dealt with include: The ECIR is generally held in Spring, near the Easter weekend.