Collaborative and co-operative information seeking

Abstract

Collaborative and cooperative aspects of information storage, seeking and retrieval have become a hot topic in recent years e.g. [1,2,4]. The acknowledgement that information seeking is a collaborative activity is part of a trend toward foregrounding the social in system design [5].The goal of this workshop was to discuss current conceptions of collaborative and cooperative information seeking activities, and to identify future research issues in the design and use of digital information spaces and information seeking tools. Our starting point was that information seeking is much more than the transmission of information from a system to a solitary user on the basis of queries issued by that user. Therefore, models of information seeking that underpin system design must move away from thinking of information seeking as single-user problem solving. Rather, such models need to explicitly address social aspects of information seeking activities.