III-Small: Result Space Support for Personal and Group Information Seeking Over Time

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The goal of this research is to develop techniques and systems that help people solve information problems that are complex, general, or ongoing and when information seeking takes place over multiple intervals or in collaboration with other people. The approach is to first study how people seek information and interpret results of searches as they use multiple systems over time and in collaboration with emphasis given to managing and optionally sharing result sets and items. Second, based on these initial investigations, systems are designed that support dynamic search and visualization and can serve both as a personal information manager and a group information manager. Third, these tools are evaluated in field and laboratory settings. The research is linked to educational theories of active learning and is embedded in university student and research team information needs over multiple months. Students play an active role in this project by participating in the design and evaluation of the information seeking systems.The results of this research will provide guidance for designers of the next generation of systems that support a full range of complex information seeking needs. The project also contributes specific open source tools that people can easily adopt as plug-ins to popular web browsing software. Publications, software and other information items will be widely disseminated, including via the project Web site (http://www.ils.unc.edu/infoseek/). This work will thus have broad impact on Internet-based information activities in schools, homes, offices, and research laboratories.