This panel session will provide examples of research efforts currently planned and/or underway that focus on ways in which to integrate the system-centered and user-centered approaches to front-end design. A panel session at the 2000 annual conference noted that research on information retrieval systems has been undertaken on these two separate, and often unrelated, tracks—one focusing on the algorithms by which queries are processed and results are ranked, and the other focusing on users and their interactions with systems (Belkin, Bilal, Gluck, & Twidale, 2000). This panel session grew out of an earlier recognition that, while both system-centered and user-centered evaluation paradigms are valuable in themselves, cooperation and communication between practitioners of these two approaches is essential for successful system design (Saracevic, 1999). Three different approaches to collaboration will be explored including the use of Delphi Techniques, case based reasoning (CBR), and user-centered benchmarks for measuring performance of retrieval systems.