The European Summer School in Information Retrieval (ESSIR) is a scientific event founded in 1990, which starts off a series of summer schools to teach about information retrieval.
Maristella Agosti in 2008 stated that: "The term IR identifies the activities that a person – the user – has to conduct to choose, from a collection of documents, those that can be of interest to him to satisfy a specific and contingent information need.
IR core subjects are: system architectures, algorithms, formal theoretical models, and evaluation of the diverse systems and services that implement functionalities of storing and retrieving documents from multimedia document collections, and over wide area networks such as the Internet.
ESSIR focuses on these three dimensions, and is intended for researchers starting out in IR, for industrialists who wish to know more about it, and for people working on topics related to management of information on the Internet.
[3] ESSIR series started in 1990 coming out from the successful experience of the Summer School in Information Retrieval (SSIR) conceived and designed by Maristella Agosti, University of Padua, Italy and Nick Belkin, Rutgers University, U.S.A., for an Italian audience in 1989.