CAREER: Collaborative Information Behavior: Exploring and Supporting Collaboration during Information Seeking and Retrieval Activities

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With the advent and continuing spread of the Internet and the World-Wide Web, information resources are becoming more and more widely available. As people in all walks of life try to use these resources to find answers to questions about issues ranging from finance to personal health, there is a general recognition that it is very difficult for individuals to find relevant information. One approach to dealing with this problem is to combine the abilities and experiences of multiple information seekers. Future information retrieval systems will therefore have to focus not only on how individuals can access and search the volumes of available information, but also on how they can collaborate with each other to find the most relevant information that meets their needs. The mounting evidence that collaborative information behavior (CIB) plays an important role in organizational work notwithstanding, most information retrieval systems (and their underlying conceptualizations of information behavior) still adopt the individual user's perspective. Focusing solely on individual information behavior has led to processes and technologies that often constrain CIB, which can be acutely problematic in settings where teams and team work are important. The PI argues that while individual information behavior cannot be ignored, we must strive to develop processes that equally support CIB, because effective integration of information retrieval technology into collaborative environments requires us to incorporate not eliminate collaboration in these technologies. His goal in this project is to address our current inability to do that, by improving our theoretical understanding of the CIB process and by advancing the design of information retrieval systems as well, in the hope of thereby alleviating the impediments to team success in critical domains. To these ends, the PI will investigate CIB in team settings within the healthcare and education domains. He will develop a model of CIB, design and implement a collaborative information retrieval prototype system, and conduct both laboratory and field evaluations of it. Project outcomes will include a better understanding of how and why people collaborate when searching for information, and how to design technologies that effectively support that collaboration.Broader Impacts: This research will lead to the development of new processes and technologies that will allow people to share their knowledge, techniques, and results with each other in order to quickly and effectively meet their information needs.