Search

Feedback is identified in the works of researchers as an essential element for improving the learning process of students. Research shows that lecturer's feedback creates value when it provides not only appraisal information but also links to further learning. This type of feedback affects the learner's information behaviour, i.e., encourages searching for additional information and using it in the learning process. The paper aims to analyze the peculiarities of students' information behaviour during feedback. The research object is investigated from an information science perspective, using theories of information behaviour. An exploratory quantitative survey of 111 Communication BA students from Vilnius University, Lithuania, was conducted. The results of the study revealed the characteristics of feedback inspired by information behaviour: the feedback provided by the lecture is the primary source of information; feedback promotes individual information search; timely feedback encourages proactive information behaviour. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose Information seeking is often performed in collaborative contexts. The research into such collaborative information seeking (CIS) has been proceeding since the 1990s but lacks methodological discussions. The purpose of this paper is to analyze and discuss methodological issues in existing CIS studies.Design/methodology/approach The authors systematically review 69 empirical CIS studies.Findings The review shows that the most common methods of data collection are lab experiments (43 percent), observation (19 percent) and surveys (16 percent), that the most common methods of data analysis are description (33 percent), statistical testing (29 percent) and content analysis (19 percent) and that CIS studies involve a fairly even mix of novice, intermediate and specialist participants. However, the authors also find that CIS research is dominated by exploratory studies, leaves it largely unexplored in what ways the findings of a study may be specific to the particular study setting, appears to assign primacy to precision at the expense of generalizability, struggles with investigating how CIS activities extend over time and provides data about behavior to a larger extent than about reasons, experiences and especially outcomes.Research limitations/implications The major implication of this review is its identification of the need for a shared model to which individual CIS studies can contribute in a cumulative manner. To support the development of such a model, the authors discuss a model of the core CIS process and a model of the factors that trigger CIS.Originality/value This study assesses the current state of CIS research, provides guidance for future CIS studies and aims to inspire further methodological discussion. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to compare and contrast research on collaborative information seeking (CIS) and expertise seeking (EXS) to identify focal themes, blind spots, and possibilities for cross-fertilization.Design/methodology/approach Existing research was reviewed. The review consisted of a content analysis of 70 (CIS) and 72 (EXS) studies with respect to the context, scope, process, and setting of CIS and EXS, supplemented with a bibliometric analysis of the references in the reviewed studies.Findings In CIS, the context is a group of actors collaborating on a shared task. In EXS, the information need is held by an individual but resolved by consulting other people. While the typical scope of EXS studies is source selection, CIS studies mostly concern the consultation of the sources and the use of the obtained information. CIS and EXS studies also attend differentially to the information-seeking process. Only 4 percent of the references in the reviewed studies are cited in both CIS and EXS research. The author concludes that, at present, CIS and EXS are different discourses about similar issues.Research limitations/implications Increased interaction between CIS and EXS will advance research in both areas and prevent duplication of effort. Topics for future research are identified. It should be noted that the findings are limited to the 142 studies reviewed.Originality/value By analyzing CIS in the context of EXS, and vice versa, this study provides a fresh look at the information-seeking research that attends to collaboration. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: Collaborative information searching is common for people when planning their group trip. However, little research has explored how tourists collaborate during information search. Existing tourism Web portals or search engines rarely support tourists' collaborative information search activities. Taking advantage of previous studies of collaborative tourism information search behavior, in the current paper the purpose of this paper is to propose the design of a collaborative search system collaborative tourism information search (ColTIS) to support online information search and travel planning. Design/methodology/approach: ColTIS was evaluated and compared with Google Talk-embedded Tripadvisor.com through a user study involving 18 pairs of participants. The data included pre- and post-search questionnaires, web search logs and chat history. For quantitative measurement, statistical analysis was performed using SPSS; for log data and the qualitative feedback from participants, the content analysis was employed. Findings: Results suggest that collaborative query formulation, division of search tasks, chatting and results sharing are important means to facilitate tourists' collaborative search. ColTIS was found to outperform Tripadvisor significantly regarding the ease of use, collaborative support and system usefulness. Originality/value: The innovation of the study lies in the development of an integrated real-time collaborative tourism information search system with unique features. These features include collaborative query reformulation, travel planner and automatic result and query sharing that assist multiple people search for holiday information together. For system designers and tourism practitioners, implications are provided. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The paper describes our novel perspective on 'searching to learn' through collaborative information seeking (CIS). We describe this perspective, which motivated empirical work to 'orchestrate' a CIS searching to learn session. The work is described through the lens of orchestration, an approach which brings to the fore the ways in which: background context-including practical classroom constraints, and theoretical perspective; actors-including the educators, researchers, and technologies; and activities that are to be completed, are brought into alignment. The orchestration is exemplified through the description of research work designed to explore a pedagogically salient construct (epistemic cognition), in a particular institutional setting. Evaluation of the session indicated satisfaction with the orchestration from students, with written feedback indicating reflection from them on features of the orchestration. We foreground this approach to demonstrate the potential of orchestration as a design approach for researching and implementing CIS as a 'searching to learn' context. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose Social question and answer (SQA) site is one of the factors that boosted up and popularized the vision of social web. It enables community members to post highly valued answers to globally asked questions and information seekers to grab intellectual information in a contextual, concise, and meaningful format at the cost of investing a few minutes. The purpose of this paper is to present a common architecture, history, and a comprehensive review of such sites.Design/methodology/approach A critical and analytical investigation of the state-of-the-art SQA sites and relevant literature has been carried out with the intention to explore the noticeable features of such sites.Findings By studying relevant literature, and analysing a number of existing systems, a number of research challenges are identified and a generic architecture of SQA sites is contributed.Practical implications The review contributes a comprehensive knowledge about SQA systems and aims to be helpful to new researchers who want to get a broad picture of SQA systems on a single platform. The domain is in its infancy and requires tremendous efforts from the research community to explore its salient aspects with respect to the human world.Originality/value The study inspects SQA sites on a large scale and makes an original contribution by presenting a comprehensive review, future research challenges, and a generic architecture of SQA sites. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Purpose: The principal aim of the present study was to identify and model the subject structure of the research area on collaborative information behaviour (CIB). Design/methodology/approach: A qualitative, inductive and exploratory approach was adopted, and the method of thematic analysis was used. This study was based on the analysis of 79 publications selected from the Library, Information Science and Technology Abstracts (LISTA) database in April 2019. Findings: Collaborative and collective information behaviours were differentiated, and the subject structure of the CIB research area was identified to contain collaborative activities oriented to both information access and content, their various conditions, means of conducting, experiences of selected communities and metascientific research on the area itself. Research limitations/implications: The limitations result primarily from relying on the research material selected from the database (LISTA) focussed mainly on the issues of library and information science. Originality/value: This study contributes by proposing an original model of the CIB research area representing its subject structure and providing a coherent list of subjects of interest to CIB researchers. Hopefully, it will also contribute to the harmonisation of terminology related to this research area and thus facilitate communication between CIB researchers and accelerate the cumulative development of scientific knowledge on CIB. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In various work domains, the collaborative performance of a work-task by a team can lead to a shared information need required to fulfill this task. Many empirical studies identified collaborative information seeking and searching (IS&S) as everyday work patterns in order to solve a shared information need and to benefit from the diverse expertise and experience of the team members. This paper presents first empirical results in an ongoing research project: We report on a pilot user study that investigates the collaborative IS&S practices of three work groups in academic and industrial research facilities. The aim of the conducted pilot study was to capture the use of software technologies for realizing collaboration, information seeking and sharing in real-world work settings. We discuss resulting design implications as guideline for extending the ezDL (ezDL: Easy Access to Digital Libraries, ) system towards supporting collaborative IS&S activities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

People often engage in collaborative information seeking to achieve common goals, enlist expertise, increase the scope of what can be searched, and even simply to help others. In today's era of increased user-generated content and online sharing, computer and information scientists have a renewed interest in collaborative information seeking as an exciting area of research and development, with applications that range from education to e-commerce, with implications for areas that range from libraries to legal informatics. The Web extra at http://youtu.be/CXnNut7hKsU is a video in which proponents of collaborative information seeking discuss why supporting people's innate behavior and the need for working together while seeking and using information are important to computer science. Featured speakers include Chirag Shah, Rob Capra, Madhu Reddy, Meredith Ringel Morris, Roberto González-Ibáñez, and Michael B. Twidale. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Copyright of Canadian Journal of Information & Library Sciences is the property of Canadian Association for Information Science and its content may not be copied or emailed to multiple sites or posted to a listserv without the copyright holder's express written permission. However, users may print, download, or email articles for individual use. This abstract may be abridged. No warranty is given about the accuracy of the copy. Users should refer to the original published version of the material for the full abstract. (Copyright applies to all Abstracts.)