Nicholas Belkin has been a Professor of Information Science in the School of Communication, Information & Library Studies at Rutgers University since May of 1985, he is currently the Program Director for the PhD program there. Belkin's research concentrates on people's interactions with information in a variety of ways, especially in interactive information retrieval systems. His results have been published in fields such as information science, information retrieval, human-computer interaction, and artificial intelligence among others. Belkin has won many awards including: ACM Recognition of Service Award twice, and the ASIS Outstanding Information Science Teacher Award among others.

The chapter begins with a discussion of what he will discuss in the paper, a differing approach to Information Retrieval. Belkin’s approach to Information Retrieval is one that, "is a problem-oriented discipline, concerned with the problem of the effective and efficient transfer of desired information between human generator and human user"(133). Later in the article in discussing an IR Communication System Belkin describes ASK or anomalous States of Knowledge.

What is ASK? In general ASK is "an attempt to take serious and explicit account of facts of the IR situation which are well documented but largely ignored in the theory and design of IR systems"(136). The basis of ASK come from Taylor’s IR system stages. The first stage being the visceral - actual but unexpressed need fused with Kochen’s concept of problem. The second stage the conscious – realized need fused with Kochen’s concept of need. Basically ASK is not an original concept, but taking ideas that exist and combining them into an idea that, "allows one to explain the problem of non-specifiability of information need"(137).

What are the implications of ASK? Belkin’s description of ASK shows that the Information Retrieval systems that use the best match principle are inappropriate because they require the user to define their information problem. The ASK idea also "suggests that the user’s knowledge is the central issue in the IR system"(139). Belkin believes that an IR system should discover and represent the user’s knowledge of the problem – not asking the user for the question, but trying to find out the question from the user.

Belkin believes that ASK or the concepts it contains would be a good topic for formal research.