Crisis response is an information intensive process, which produces and consumes large quantities of information from, and for, different relief/response organizations. The traditional centralized IT system design principle dominantly used to address interorganizational information retrieval over boundaries is no longer feasible due to its lack of flexibility and adaptability to deal with dynamically changing information needs caused by the unpredictable nature of a crisis. In this paper we present our ongoing research regarding a new service architecture for information seeking and retrieval, which offers a new way of thinking about seeking and retrieval of role-based, situation- aware information in the context of a crisis situation.