Collaborative Information Retrieval

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Collaborative Information Retrieval

• Raya Fidel and Harry Bruce
• School of Library and Information Science
• University of Washington

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Team work

• Growing emphasis on team work as an essential
  part the modern workplace
• Assumption
• a carefully constructed team can focus attention
  on a problem with a collective expertise that is
  (somehow) greater than the sum of it parts
• Teamwork is a management challenge but it is also
  an intriguing information problem

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Research Team

• University of Washington
• Raya Fidel and Harry Bruce
• Cynde Moya and Dianne Rosolowsky
• Microsoft Research
• Sue Dumais
• Jonathon Grudin
• Boeing
• Stephen Poltrock
• Risoe Center of Human-Machine Interaction
• Annelise Mark Pejtersen

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Information and team work

• Identifying the teams problem
• Negotiating the shared gap by applying collective
  expertise to the shared information problem
• A point at which the gap cannot be narrowed by
  the applied expertise of individual team members
• Shared understanding
• Shared information need

?
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Shared information need
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What happens then?

• Collaborative Information retrieval?
• Broadly defined CIR could involve
• Two or more team members working together to find
  information for a specific problem
• Team members looking for information for a
  specific problem in parallel or sequentially.
• Team members looking for information on the
  advice of other team members who had found the
  same or similar information earlier
• and so on..

?
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Manifestations of CIR
A group of people trying to find at the same time
some information needed by the group
(Baeza-Yates and Pino, 1997)
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Information behavior in teams Manifestations
of CIR?

• Concurrent engineering
• Integrated design management Collaborative
  design Collaborative product development
  (Jassawalla and Sashittal, 1999 Sandusky, 1997
  Rusinko, 1999 Cutkosky et al.)
• Team navigation (Hutchins,1990)
• Group memory (Berlin et al., 1993 Nichol and
  Twidale, 1997)
• Information gathering in social networks (Munro,
  1998)
• Cooperative policy making (van den Herick and de
  Vreede, 1997)
• Collaborative concept formation (Sumi et al.,
  1997)
• Loosely coupled information seeking (Palfreyman
  and Rodden, 1998)
• Collaborative diagnosis (Cicourel, 1990 Forsythe
  et al., 1992)
• Information sharing (Adams et al., 1999)
• Collaborative learning and working Over the
  shoulder learning (Twidale and Nichols, 1998
  Procter et al., 1998)
• Collaborative knowledge production
  (Karamuftuoglu, 1998)

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Information behavior in teams Manifestations
of CIR?

• Collaborative behaviors
• Collaborative technology
• Managerial perspectives
• Communication perspectives
• Negotiating differences through task-relevant
  discourse
• Resource sharing/ pooling
• Social dimensions of information behavior
• authority derived from expertise

10
Information behavior in teams Manifestations
of CIR?

• Collaborative system use
• Collaborative definition of need
• Collaborative information retrieval
• Collaborative unification of information
• Collaborative production of information

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No studies of. (Romano et al., 1999)

• Collaborative query formulation
• Collaborative assessment of relevance, validity,
  sufficiency
• Team information forage
• Comparison of collaborative searches with
  summed independent team member searches

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• Framework for Cognitive Work Analysis and
  evaluation
• Jens Rasmussen and Annelise Mark Pejtersen
• First Step - Analysis

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Framework for Work Analysis
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Analysis

• User characteristics
• E.g. formal training, area of expertise, tasks
• Task situation in terms of mental strategies
• E.g. preference about information sources,
  information seeking style
• Task situation in terms of decision making
• E.g. information need, information use, decisions
  made
• Task situation in terms of work domain
• E.g. purpose of task, physical activities
  involved, priorities

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Analysis

• Work domain analysis in terms of structure
• E.g. goals of workplace, priorities, work
  processes
• Organizational analysis in terms of division of
  work
• E.g. how is the work divided among the team
  criteria used
• Organizational analysis in terms of social
  organization
• Communication among peers who makes what
  decisions

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Second Step Evaluation
Framework for System Evaluation
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Evaluation

• Does the presentation of information match user
  characteristics?
• Are all relevant strategies supported?
• Does the technology available support cognitive
  decision making?
• Does the technology support the accomplishment of
  the task?

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Evaluation

• Does the organizational structure support the
  accomplishment of the task?
• Does the technology support cooperative work?
• Does the team structure support cooperative work?
• Does the organizational structure support
  cooperative work?
• Does the social structure support cooperative
  work?

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Work Plan

• Phase 1
• Observations and interviews
• Four teams and their members in Boeing and
  Microsoft
• Phase 2
• Evaluative data analysis
• Survey instrument
• Validity and generalizability
• Descriptive and evaluative report
• Phase 3
• Technological enhancements
• Organizational enhancements