Dr Jill Freyne is a postdoctoral researcher in the Department of Computer Science and Informatics in University College Dublin. She received her PhD from UCD, and worked as part of the I-SPY research project which focuses on personalized, community based Web search. Since taking up the position of postdoctoral researcher she has continued her work in the area of social support, has spent time as a visiting researcher in the University of Pittsburgh and is currently waiting to take up a similar post in the Collaborative User Experience Group in IBM Boston. Collaborative Information Retrieval – Providing ASSISTance to YouTube Users. Search engines have become people’s primary tool for locating information on the Web but search engines continue to struggle with the challenges presented by Web search: vague queries, non text based content, impatient users and an enormous, and rapidly expanding, collection of documents. Conventional approaches to Web search—those that adopt a traditional, document-centric, information retrieval perspective—are limited to text based repositories and their refusal to consider the past search behaviour of users during future search sessions. ASSIST is a social search and navigation architecture which seeks to exploit the high degree of natural repetition and regularity in search and browsing information access patters that are prevalent among communities of searchers. ASSIST reuses the search and navigation experiences of community members, to promote content that has previously been judged relevant by community members. This allows a generic search and navigation tools to adapt to the preferences of communities of individuals. In this talk Jill will demonstrate the potential gain for users when trying to seek out information in large non text-based repositories by detailing her latest project which brings social support to the well known YouTube video sharing site.