Beyond traditional collaborative search: Understanding the effect of awareness on multi-level collaborative information retrieval

I. Introduction Studies reveal that often group members collaborate when searching for information even if they were not explicitly asked to collaborate [1]. The activity that involves a group of people engaging in a common information seeking task is called Collaborative Information Seeking (CIS). Over the past few years, CIS research has focused on providing solutions and frameworks to support the process [2]. However, work in this field to date has always assumed that information seekers engaged in CIS activity are using the same access modality, the visual modality. The attention on this modality has failed to address the needs of users who employ different access modalities such as haptic and/or audio. Visual Impaired (VI) employees in a workplace may often have to collaborate with their sighted team members when searching the web. Given that the VI individual's search behaviour is challenged by poor web design and the shortcomings of current assistive technology [3][4]; collaboratively engaging in w...

It is our great pleasure to welcome you to the 3rd International Workshop on Collaborative Information Retrieval (CIR2011). The first workshop focused on broad topics and sought to establish a vocabulary for discussion about collaborative information seeking, to identify work practices and disciplines that might benefit from collaborative information seeking, and to establish a community of researchers with related interests. The second workshop built on the previous results, and focused on issues of communication and awareness in support of collaborative information seeking. In this third workshop we focus on algorithmic and other software issues related to collaborative information seeking. We would like to explore a variety of algorithms for mediating collaboration, look at the design of frameworks and toolkits to support collaborative information seeking, and also to examine how different user interface elements can be used to support associated activity.

Annual Review of Information Science and TechnologyVolume 40, Issue 1 p. 329-356 Information Needs and Use Collaborative information seeking and retrieval Jonathan Foster, Jonathan Foster University of SheffieldSearch for more papers by this author Jonathan Foster, Jonathan Foster University of SheffieldSearch for more papers by this author First published: 28 September 2007 https://doi.org/10.1002/aris.1440400115Citations: 85Read the full textAboutPDF ToolsRequest permissionExport citationAdd to favoritesTrack citation ShareShare Give accessShare full text accessShare full-text accessPlease review our Terms and Conditions of Use and check box below to share full-text version of article.I have read and accept the Wiley Online Library Terms and Conditions of UseShareable LinkUse the link below to share a full-text version of this article with your friends and colleagues. Learn more.Copy URL Share a linkShare onFacebookTwitterLinked InRedditWechat Citing Literature Volume40, Issue12006Pages 329-356 RelatedInformation

Most information seeking and retrieval systems are designed for individual use, and prototype collaborative systems are too limited to support use in heterogeneous environments. Easy Access to Digital Libraries (ezDL) attempts to bridge this gap by integrating familiar information sharing and management functions with communication tools into a flexible, scalable network in which individuals and groups function as nodes.

Collaboration is often required or encouraged for activities that are too complex or difficult to deal with for an individual. Many situations involving information seeking also call for people working together. Despite its natural appeal and situational necessity, collaboration in information seeking is an understudied domain. The nature of the available information and its role in our lives have changed significantly, but the methods and tools that are used to access and share that information in collaboration have remained largely unaltered. This dissertation is an attempt to develop a new framework for collaborative information seeking (CIS) with a focus on user-centric system designs. To develop this framework, existing practices for doing collaboration, along with motivations and methods, are studied. This initial investigation and a review of literature are followed by a series of carefully created design studies, helping us develop a prototype CIS system, Coagmento. This system is then used for a large-scale laboratory experiment with a focus on studying the role and the impact of awareness in CIS projects. Through this study, it is shown that appropriate support for group awareness can help collaborators be more productive, engaged, and aware in collaboration without burdening them with additional load. Using the lessons derived from the literature as well as the set of studies presented in this dissertation, a novel framework for CIS is proposed. Such a framework could help us develop, study, and evaluate CIS systems with a more comprehensive understanding of various CIS processes, and the users of these systems. Dissertation available online at: http://comminfo.rutgers.edu/~chirags/papers/Shah_Dissertation.pdf.

The development of systems to support collaborative information seeking is a challenging issue for many reasons. Besides the support expected for an individual user, such as query formulation, relevance judgement, result set organization and summarization, the smooth exchange of search related information within the team of users seeking information has to be supported. This imposes strong requirements on visualization and interaction to enable user to easily trace and interpret the search activities of other team members and to jointly make sense of gathered information in order to solve the initial information need. In this paper, we briefly motivate specific requirements with a focus on collaborative professional search, review existing work and point out major challenges. In addition, we briefly introduce a system that has been specifically developed to support collaborative technology search.

Recent work have shown the potential of collaboration for solving complex or exploratory search tasks allowing to achieve synergic effects with respect to individual search, which is the prevalent information retrieval (IR) setting this last decade. This interactive multiuser context gives rise to several challenges in IR. One main challenge relies on the adaptation of IR techniques or models [8] in order to build algo-rithmic supports of collaboration distributing documents among users. The second challenge is related to the design of Collaborative Information Retrieval (CIR) models and their effectiveness evaluation since individual IR frameworks and measures do not totally fit with the collaboration paradigms. In this tutorial, we address the second challenge and present first a general overview of collaborative search introducing the main underlying notions. Then, we focus on related work dealing with collaborative ranking models and their effectiveness evaluation. Our primary objective is to introduce these notions by highlighting how and why they should be different from individual IR in order to give participants the main clues for investigating new research directions in this domain with a deep understanding of current CIR work.

In this position paper, we describe the unique challenges of collaborative information retrieval (MLCIR) in an environment where information access and visibility is not equal across all participants. We call this multi-level collaborative information retrieval, after the term used to describe an environment with differing classification levels. In contrast to traditional collaborative information retrieval, which focuses on technologies to facilitate dynamics in a group, MLCIR must be aware of the information flow in a group, making sure there is not information contamination and inadvertent disclosure of information, while still allowing for collaboration. We cover some of the challenges, and discuss impact on not just formal MLCIR domains, but also more traditional collaborative information seeking domains.

Collaborative information seeking (CIS) has lately produced interesting empirical studies, describing CIS in real-life settings. While these studies explore how and why CIS manifests itself in different domains, discussions about how to study CIS have been scarce. The research area of CIS may, however, benefit from a discussion of methodological issues. This chapter describes the application of three methods for collecting and analyzing data in three CIS studies. The three methods are Multidimensional Exploration, used in a CIS study of students’ information behavior during a group assignment; Task-structured Observation, used in a CIS study of patent engineers; and Condensed Observation, used in a CIS study of information-systems development. The three methods are presented in the context of the studies for which they were devised, and the experiences gained using the methods are discussed. The chapter shows that different methods can be used for collecting and analyzing data about CIS incidents. Two of the methods focused on tasks and events in work settings, while the third was applied in an educational setting. Commonalities and differences among the methods are discussed to inform decisions about their applicability in future CIS studies and, more generally, to foster methodological discussions in CIS research.

Collaborative Information Seeking (CIS) is common in many professional contexts. This chapter discusses CIS from four different perspectives – education, healthcare, science research and patent research. We first introduce the CIS context, focusing on Evans and Chi’s proposed model of social search. We highlight the ways contextual factors relate to the search process, in particular noting the role of communication in CIS processes. The four example professional contexts are discussed with reference to the ‘medium’ of collaboration, the ways CIS is conducted, the tools used and physical setting of CIS, and the ‘context’ of CIS, the purposes for which an instance of CIS occurs in that discipline. We suggest that these contextual factors can be aligned with, but are additional to, the existing Evans and Chi model of social search, and that their addition in a ‘pre- and post-model’ extension could provide a shared framework for researching contextual features of CIS. In highlighting commonalities and contrasts across the disciplinary contexts we suggest that a developed model, and further research, is needed to understand the relationship between motivations in these different disciplines and the evaluation of CIS episodes, and the role of processes, particularly communication, in those episodes. In order to evaluate CIS in different disciplines future research should focus on the between, and within discipline differences in the purposes of CIS. Characteristics of success in different disciplinary contexts may relate both to the consideration of the collaborative context, and the information need; developing deeper understanding of this point.

Social media plays an increasingly important role in travel information seeking and decision-making. However, there is limited understanding of how a group of tourists use social media to plan trips collaboratively and the different practices between countries. In this study, we investigated the collaborative information seeking (CIS) and sharing behaviours of mobile social media users from Australia, Bangladesh and China. Specifically, we surveyed a total of 219 participants to explore the differences in CIS behaviours when people were planning a group trip. The findings suggest significant differences among three countries in terms of the motivations of using social media, CIS activities and social interactions outside the group. Key findings include Bangladeshi and Chinese travellers preferred known contacts on social media, while Australian tourists intended to use both known contacts and user-generated contents for seeking information. The findings also show that social interactions employed by individuals are considered as an important complement of and are interwoven with in-group CIS; both contribute to tourism information seeking. Finally, we propose a framework for CIS research in the tourism domain.

This chapter’s purpose is two-fold: introduce the notions of collaboration and information seeking/retrieval, and provide a context in which these concepts will be discussed throughout the book. It is achieved by concisely yet clearly indicating what is meant by collaboration here, how information seeking and information retrieval (IR) are seen to be related, and what it means to collaborate in information seeking. An attempt is also made to situate collaborative information seeking (CIS) with related concepts such as collaborative information behavior and collaborative sense-making. Several examples and scenarios are presented to clarify how CIS situations arise and why we should care about them.

This chapter aims to master web mining and Information Retrieval (IR) in the digital age, thus describing the overviews of web mining and web usage mining; the significance of web mining in the digital age; the overview of IR; the concept of Collaborative Information Retrieval (CIR); the evaluation of IR systems; and the significance of IR in the digital age. Web mining can contribute to the increase in profits by selling more products and by minimizing costs. Web mining is the application of data mining techniques to discover the interesting patterns from web data in order to better serve the needs of web-based multifaceted applications. Mining web data can improve the personalization, create the selling opportunities, and lead to more profitable relationships with customers in global business. Web mining techniques can be applied with the effective analysis of the clearly understood business needs and requirements. Web mining builds the detailed customer profiles based on the transactional data. Web mining is used to create the personalized search engines which can recognize the individuals' search queries by analyzing and profiling the web user's search behavior. IR is the process of obtaining relevant information from a collection of informational resources. IR has considerably changed with the expansion of the Internet and the advent of modern and inexpensive graphical user interfaces and mass storage devices. The effective IR system, including an active indexing system, not only decreases the chances that information will be misfiled but also expedites the retrieval of information. Regarding IR utilization, the resulting time-saving benefit increases office efficiency and productivity while decreasing stress and anxiety. Most IR systems provide the advanced searching capabilities that allow users to create the sophisticated queries. The chapter argues that applying web mining and IR has the potential to enhance organizational performance and reach strategic goals in the digital age.

While most research in the area of human‐information behavior has focused on a single dimension—either the psychological or the social—this case study demonstrated the importance of a multidimensional approach. The Cognitive Work Analysis framework guided this field study of one event of collaborative information retrieval (CIR) carried out by design engineers at Microsoft, including observations and interviews. Various dimensions explained the motives for this CIR event and the challenges the participants encountered: the cognitive dimension, the specific task and decision, the organization of the teamwork, and the organizational culture. Even though it is difficult at times to separate one dimension from another, and all are interdependent, the analysis uncovered several reasons for design engineers to engage in CIR, such as when they are new to the organization or the team, when the information lends itself to various interpretations, or when most of the needed information is not documented. Similar multidimensional studies will enhance our understanding of human‐information behavior.

Information seeking and management practices are an integral aspect of people's daily work. However, we still have little understanding of collaboration in the information seeking process. Through a survey of collaborative information seeking practices of academic researchers, we found that researchers reported that (1) the lack of expertise is the primary reason that they collaborate when seeking information; (2) traditional methods, including face-to-face, phone, and email are the preferred communication mediums for collaboration; and (3) collaborative information seeking activities are usually successful and more useful than individually seeking information. These results begin to highlight the important role that collaborative information seeking plays in daily work.