Welcome to the 9th Dutch-Belgian Information Retrieval Workshop (DIR). I very well remember the DIR workshop in 2001 that was also organized in Twente. It took place exactly one day before my PhD defense, to give us the opportunity to have one of the PhD committee members, Stephen Robertson, as the keynote speaker. I am proud to see that DIR does not need PhD defenses any more to attract excellent keynotes. This year, DIR presents Rene van Erk, Director of Product- and Business Development Europe at Wolters Kluwer as the industry keynote; we present professor Gerhard Weikum, Scientific Director at the Max-Planck Institute for Informatics, as the academic keynote. We also present comedian Daniel van Veen as the "cultural keynote" to let our participants taste a bit of our university's unique campus activities. We have tried this year to especially encourage PhD students and researchers from industry to submit their research. Each submission was reviewed by at least two and often three or four program committee members. We thank the program committee members for their high quality reviews. Of 15 submissions to DIR, 12 were accepted. Another 5 submissions were accepted as poster presentations. Four papers were written with participation from industry and most other papers have a PhD student as the first author. Special thanks to the Netherlands Research School for Information and Knowledge Systems (SIKS) for sponsoring the participation of Dutch SIKS members, to the Werkgemeenschap Informatiewetenschap (WGI) for providing a solid financial basis for organizing DIR now and in the future, to the Netherlands Organization of Scientific Research (NWO) for sponsoring the travel and hotel costs of our international keynote speaker Gerhard Weikum, to the Centre for Telematics and Information Technology (CTIT) for sponsoring the proceedings, to the University of Twente and to Cultural Center the Vrijhof for sponsoring our cultural activity on Monday.