Collaborative information behavior, seeking, and searching

An area that has some high pay off potential but has receive only minimal research attention is collaborative information searching (i.e., when two or more people collectively search for similar information to attend an shared need).

We do it all the time when working in groups, at work on collective problem, when doing planning, and even at home when looking at family vacations and such. However, there has been very little study into what triggers an episode of collaborative information seeking, what technologies are needed to support such activities, and how can one use technology to facilitate sharing of both information and the process to locate this information.

Some of the original work in collaborative information retrieval was done at the University of Washington. Microsoft is also doing work in collaborative information retrieval tools.

I’ve co-authored a paper on collaborative information searching, where my collaborator and I propose a framework composed of agents, users, information, and context.

I predict that we will see some commercial, niche search engines in this area soon.