Collaborative Information Seeking

The notions that information seeking is not always an individual activity and that people working collaboratively for information-intensive tasks should be studied and supported are more prevalent now than ever before. Several new research questions, methodologies, and systems have emerged around these ideas that may even prove to be useful beyond the field of collaborative information seeking (CIS CIS ), as they are relevant to the broader areas of information seeking and behavior. This chapter provides an overview of several key research works from a variety of domains, including library and information science (LIS), computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) CSCW CSCW computer-supported cooperative work computer-supported cooperative work , human-computer interaction (HCI) HCI human-computer interaction , and information retrieval (IR) IR information retrieval . It starts with explanations of collaboration and how CIS CIS fits in different contexts, emphasizing the interactive, intentional, and mutually beneficial nature of CIS CIS activities. CIS CIS ’s relationships to similar and related fields such as collaborative information retrieval (CIR) CIR collaborative information retrieval , collaborative information behavior (CIB) CIB collaborative information behavior , and collaborative filtering collaborative filtering are also clarified. Finally, the chapter presents a synthesis of various frameworks and models that exist in the field today.