The research area of Distributed Information Retrieval (DIR) provides techniques that help to integrate multiple searchable resources into a single federated resource and provide direct access to them through a single system. A DIR system can access Deep Web resources through their search interfaces without crawling them. Also it does not need to maintain a complete index of all the federated collections while retrieval results are always consistent and up-to-date. Moreover, it leverages the strengths of dedicated search engines forwarding user queries directly to them. The proposed course will give the background and motivation for DIR research. The main DIR architectures will be presented and discussed, namely, broker-based architecture, DIR over peer-to-peer networks and Open Archive Initiatives. However, the main focus of the tutorial will be the brokerbased architecture and its main phases.