SGER: Identifying Triggers for Collaborative Information Behavior: A Field Study of Rural Healthcare IT Teams

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In modern organizations, people must work together to find and share information, to locate expertise, and to carry out a wide variety of information activities. However, in these collaborative environments, information behavior is still viewed from a primarily individual perspective. This misperception has lead to organizations creating processes and technologies that facilitate and support individual information behavior, but not collaborative information behavior (CIB). Few researchers have focused on the role that collaboration plays in information seeking and retrieval activities. This proposal addresses two critical questions: (1) What triggers collaborative information behavior? (2) How do team members respond to these triggers?The goal of this research is to refine an emerging analytical model of collaborative information behavior by focusing on CIB triggers in a medical context. An ethnographic study will be conducted among distributed IT teams in a regional center and surrounding rural hospitals. The contributions of the project will be the identification of different categories of CIB triggers, an improved understanding of CIB, design criteria to support the development of collaborative information retrieval tools.Broader impacts A deeper conceptual understanding of CIB triggers and how people respond to them can lead to improving collaborative practices as people seek and share information needed to address critical issues in different environments. This improved understanding will also lead to the development of more robust information retrieval systems that will support collaboration amongst users during information seeking and retrieval activities. This will address the issues that are limiting, and in some cases, preventing people from effectively and efficiently using the vast amount of information content available to people as they collaborate to solve problems.