Collaborative Information Seeking by the Numbers

Computer, 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

Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2008

Collaboration plays an important role in the information seeking and retrieval activities within a team setting. In this research, we examined the impact of collaborative design features in two information retrieval tools that explicitly support collaboration. We designed the two collaborative information searching prototype, MUSE (Multi-User Search Engine) and MUST (Multi-User Search and Talk) and evaluated both systems. Results indicate that the communication (i.e., chat) function played an important role in enhancing the information seeking process by establishing common ground among group members. We also identified unexpected challenges that arose as the prototypes were used during these activities. These challenges were both technical and social in nature. We discuss implications for system design and directions for future research.

Despite the many implicit references to the social contexts of search within Information Seeking and Retrieval research, there has been relatively little work that has specifically investigated the additional requirements for collaborative information seeking interfaces. Here, we re-assess a recent analytical inspection framework, designed for individual information seeking, and then apply it to evaluate a recent collaborative information seeking interface: SearchTogether. The framework was built upon two models of solitary information seeking, and so as part of the re-assessment we first re-frame the models for collaborative contexts. We re-frame a model of search tactics, providing revised definitions that consider known collaborators. We then re-frame a model of user profiles to analyse support for different group dynamics. After presenting an analysis of SearchTogether, we reflect on its accuracy, showing that the framework identified 8 known truths, 8 new insights, and no known-to-be-untrue insights into the design. We conclude that the framework a) can still be applied to collaborative information seeking interfaces; b) can successfully produce additional requirements for collaborative information seeking interfaces; and c) can successfully model different dynamics of collaborating searchers.

Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2012

Abstract This paper presents a user study aiming to investigate search processes in collaborative exploratory Web search. Our analysis of search processes focuses on the distribution and transition of user search actions captured in a collaborative web search system called CollabSearch. The results show that a large proportion of users' actions in collaborative searches were related to explicit communication, which is one of the sources for users to obtain query ideas. This paper concludes with some insights on the range of ...

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.

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.

2008

Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology, 2010

Many theories and models exist for understanding and explaining information seeking processes (ISP) for individuals. Such is not the case for collaborative information seeking (CIS), despite its growing importance. In this paper we take Kuhlthau's ISP model, designed for individual information seeking, and map it to a CIS situation. We present a laboratory study with 84 participants in 42 pairs and demonstrate how their information seeking processes over two sessions can be mapped to various stages of the ISP model. In addition, we explore the affective dimension of information seeking as well as perceived relevance expressed by the participants through their interactions. We discuss similarities and disparities of ISP for individuals and collaborative information seeking. In particular, we show that there is a logical progression from uncertainty about the task to being satisfied about the collected information among the participants; and at the same time, there is a lack of clear segmentation between stages of formulating information need, exploring information, and collecting it. The latter can be attributed to exploratory search tasks and interactions among the collaborators.