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

随着互联网和万维网的出现和不断普及，信息资源变得越来越广泛。随着各行各业的人们试图利用这些资源来寻找从金融到个人健康等问题的答案，人们普遍认识到，个人很难找到相关信息。解决这一问题的一种方法是将多个信息寻求者的能力和经验结合起来。因此，未来的信息检索系统不仅要关注个人如何获取和搜索大量可用的信息，而且要关注他们如何相互协作，找到满足其需求的最相关的信息。越来越多的证据表明，协作信息行为(CIB)在组织工作中发挥着重要作用，尽管大多数信息检索系统(及其基本的信息行为概念)仍然采用个人用户的视角。只关注个人信息行为导致了经常限制CIB的过程和技术，在团队和团队合作非常重要的环境中，这可能是一个严重的问题。PI认为，虽然不能忽视个人的信息行为，但我们必须努力开发同样支持CIB的流程，因为将信息检索技术有效地整合到协作环境中需要我们结合而不是消除这些技术中的协作。他在这个项目中的目标是解决我们目前无法做到的问题，通过提高我们对CIB过程的理论理解，以及通过推进信息检索系统的设计，希望从而减少团队在关键领域取得成功的障碍。为此，PI将在医疗保健和教育领域内的团队环境中调查CIB。他将开发一个CIB模型，设计和实现一个协作信息检索原型系统，并对其进行实验室和现场评估。项目成果将包括更好地了解人们在搜索信息时如何以及为什么协作，以及如何设计有效支持这种协作的技术。广泛影响：这项研究将导致开发新的流程和技术，使人们能够相互分享他们的知识、技术和结果，以便快速有效地满足他们的信息需求。

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.