Proceedings of 1st International Workshop on Collaborative Information Seeking

TL;DR

This workshop paper discusses collaborative information seeking, exploring models, practices, and evaluation methods, with real-world examples and system implementations to advance understanding in small-team search activities.

Contribution

It provides a comprehensive overview of collaborative information seeking, proposing models and discussing real-world applications to stimulate further research in this emerging area.

Findings

Discussion on terminology and research space positioning

Models based on sense-making and Berrypicking theory

Descriptions of systems implementing collaborative search features

Abstract

The goal of the workshop is to bring together researchers interested in various aspects of small-team collaborative search to share ideas, to stimulate research in the area, and to increase the visibility of this emerging area. We expect to identify promising directions for further exploration and to establish collaborative links among research groups. The workshop took place on June 20, 2008 in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, USA, in conjunction with the JCDL 2008 conference. The workshop was organized around three themes: practices, models, and evaluation. We started with a discussion (still ongoing) about terminology, about how to situate our work in the existing research space. We also wanted to motivate our modeling and design discussions with real-world examples of collaboration. We discussed examples from the healthcare domain, students, faculty members, the military, and businesses such as pharmaceutical companies that conduct research. We discussed several models of collaborative information seeking, including sense-making, communication, and information seeking theory based on Marcia Bates' Berrypicking theory. Finally, presenters described several systems that implement various aspects of collaboration, including using search paths, simulations of user behavior to model system performance, and characterizing properties of groups that lead to more effective collaboration.