Task complexity, problem structure and information actions: Integrating studies on information seeking and retrieval

Abstract

Analyzing actions to be supported by information and information retrieval (IR) systems is vital for understanding the needs of different types of information, search strategies and relevance assessments, in short, understanding IR. A necessary condition for this understanding is to link results from information seeking studies to the body of knowledge by IR studies. The actions to be focused on in this paper are tasks from the angle of problem solving. I will analyze certain features of work tasks and relate these features to types of information people are looking for and using in their tasks, patterning of search strategies for obtaining information and relevance assessments in choosing retrieved documents. The major claim is that these information activities are systematically connected to task complexity and structure of the problem at hand. The argumentation is based on both theoretical and empirical results from studies on information retrieval and seeking.