Designing Search Tasks for Archive Search

TL;DR

This paper introduces a set of structured search tasks designed to study user behavior in archive search systems, emphasizing temporal aspects and providing evaluation methods for large-scale analysis.

Contribution

It proposes novel, refined search tasks and evaluation mechanisms for analyzing user search strategies in longitudinal archives, aiding future system design and research.

Findings

Tasks are viable for studying archive search behavior

Refined tasks improve understanding of user strategies

Evaluation methods support large-scale analysis

Abstract

Longitudinal corpora like legal, corporate and newspaper archives are of immense value to a variety of users, and time as an important factor strongly influences their search behavior in these archives. While many systems have been developed to support users temporal information needs, questions remain over how users utilize these advances to satisfy their needs. Analyzing their search behavior will provide us with novel insights into search strategy, guide better interface and system design and highlight new problems for further research. In this paper we propose a set of search tasks, with varying complexity, that IIR researchers can utilize to study user search behavior in archives. We discuss how we created and refined these tasks as the result of a pilot study using a temporal search engine. We not only propose task descriptions but also pre and post-task evaluation mechanisms that can be employed for a large-scale study (crowdsourcing). Our initial findings show the viability of such tasks for investigating search behavior in archives.