Collaborative Information Seeking [Guest editors' introduction]

Computer, 2000

2008

It is natural for humans to collaborate while dealing with complex problems. In this article I consider this process of collaboration in the context of information seeking. The study and discussion presented here are driven by two dissatisfactions: (1) the majority of IR systems today do not facilitate collaboration directly, and (2) the concept of collaboration itself is not well-understood. I begin by probing the notion of collaboration and propose a model that helps us understand the requirements for a successful collaboration. A model of a Collaborative Information Seeking (CIS) environment is then rendered based on an extended model of information seeking.

Bulletin of the American Society for …, 2010

S ince 2000 the SIG/USE Symposium has been a staple of the ASIS&T Annual Meetings. In the nine years since its inception the symposium has provided a space for dialogue among the information science community -both specialists and lay professional public -about key issues and topics facing information, its users, its uses and its technologies. And like all such endeavors, it has required hard work, creativity, perseverance and passion.

International Journal of Web-Based Learning and Teaching Technologies, 2000

Computing Research Repository, 2009

People can help other people find information in networked information seeking environments. Recently, many such systems and algorithms have proliferated in industry and in academia. Unfortunately, it is difficult to compare the systems in meaningful ways because they often define collaboration in different ways. In this paper, we propose a model of possible kinds of collaboration, and illustrate it with

2010

Support for explicit collaboration in information-seeking activities is increasingly recognized as a desideratum for search systems. Several tools have emerged recently that help groups of people with the same information-seeking goals to work together. Many issues for these collaborative information-seeking (CIS) environments remain understudied.The authors identified awareness as one of these issues in CIS, and they presented a user study that involved 42 pairs of participants, who worked in collaboration over 2 sessions with 3 instances of the authors' CIS system for exploratory search. They showed that while having awareness of personal actions and history is important for exploratory search tasks spanning multiple sessions, support for group awareness is even more significant for effective collaboration. In addition, they showed that support for such group awareness can be provided without compromising usability or introducing additional load on the users.

Proceedings of the 1986 ACM conference on Computer-supported cooperative work - CSCW '86, 1986