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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.

This paper describes co-located collaborative information seeking in the context of the Social Media Tracking Centre (SMTC) in Ghana. The SMTC was operational for three days during the Presidential elections in Dec 2016. The SMTC»s role was to collaboratively find and verify novel, actionable, and relevant information on social media and escalate it to the authorities to use that information to ensure a transparent and peaceful election process. We performed a qualitative analysis of semi-structured interviews with the volunteers at the SMTC as well as its managing team. We present, in this paper, the importance of volunteer motivation and co-location in the success of the SMTC, as well as the users» feedback on the collaborative tool, informing future design, derived from our analysis.

Purpose– The purpose of this paper is to explore the value of utilising a holistic ergonomic approach, covering engineering, cognitive and social perspectives, to cultivate beneficial and productive collaborative information seeking (CIS) systems and environments, specifically with regard to three main CIS pillars (control, communication and awareness).Design/methodology/approach– A qualitative research approach, based on a selective corpus of CIS literature, was utilised to perform a content analysis to note if terms and concepts normally associated with engineering, cognitive and social ergonomics can be used to eliminate terms reflecting issues related to three CIS pillars (control, communication and awareness) that can benefit from a holistic ergonomic approach.Findings– The content analysis revealed that a fairly extensive amount of holistic ergonomic terminology is prominent within the CIS literature, therefore establishing a connection between the two disciplines: CIS and ergonomics. This suggests that CIS system issues could benefit from the insights of a holistic ergonomic approach.Research limitations/implications– Since this is an exploratory study the scope of CIS literature utilised in the content analysis was limited to a selection considered most important by the authors; this should be supplemented by further research.Practical implications– Intended to instigate interest in further exploration of the beneficial and productive implications and practical application of holistic ergonomics in designing CIS systems and environments.Originality/value– This is the first research paper in the Library and Information Science literature that explores the potential of utilising holistic ergonomics to cultivate CIS systems and environments.

PurposeThis paper aims to explore the potential of personal information management (PIM) and reference management. The contribution focuses on collaboration: the issues that need to be addressed in planning, the human component in collaborative information seeking, and issues for research by librarians.Design/methodology/approachThe paper is written against the background of research from information behaviour, PIM, collaborative information seeking and collaborative work.FindingsThere is growing emphasis on collaboration in information seeking, learning and work. PIM and reference management practices and their supporting software can greatly support this. There are, however, many planning/conceptual issues as well as the human component to recon with.Originality/valueAlthough much has been published on developments in PIM and reference management, there is limited coverage of collaboration and PIM and reference management.

This special issue brings together papers that describe some of the many ways that collaborative information seeking manifests itself. Some papers report on collaborative practices in a range of domains, including medical (Hertzum), legal (Attfield et al.), and online QA Evans et al.; Wilson and schraefel; Foley and Smeaton), and others describe systems and algorithms that support collaboration in various ways (Boydell and Smyth; Fernandez-Luna et al., Halvey et al., Morris et al.; Shah et al.).

Conversational approaches to human—computer collaboration have so far mostly been employed for the design of natural language interfaces. It is claimed, however, that the conversational interaction model described in the paper can also feasibly be applied to graphical and multimodal interactions. The model comprises two interrelated parts: first, the description of local discourse structures and functional interrelations between dialogue acts to capture (local) conversational tactics, and second, the description of global structures by so-called dialogue scripts which are related to (global) information-seeking strategies. The application of the model in a multi-media information retrieval system is described in the conclusions to the paper.

This paper presents a task-based user study carried out to investigate how explicit roles assigned to group members affected collaborative information seeking behaviour during a travel planning task. 24 pairs participated our study where half of them were given a specific instruction to divide the roles into a searcher and writer, while others were given no such instruction. The evaluation looked at travel plans generated, search interaction logs, task perceptions, and dialogues between members. The results suggest that explicit division of roles can have significant effect son a group's knowledge building during the collaborative search task. The paper also discusses experimental designs of task-based collaborative search studies.

This paper presents results of an exploratory study which observed Linux novice users performing complex technical tasks using Google's search engine. In this study we observed that information triage is a difficult process for unexperienced users unless well structured information is provided which results in better satisfaction and search effectiveness. Providing a well structured information allows users to browse through different pieces of documentation without depending exclusively on the keyword search. Based on these observations, this research prototyped Kolline, a system that aims to facilitate information seeking for unexperienced users by allowing more experienced users to collaborate together. Users in Kolline create a task-oriented navigation structure based on web annotations. In this paper we discuss the potential benefits of this technique on helping unexperienced users to solve complex search tasks and present improvements for future work.

With the rapid development of Internet, there is a growing development of collaboration through the Internet. In this course, Collaboration for academic information seeking always takes place due to the complex and interdisciplinary of science research task. Based on this, the paper introduces the main features of academic information. Then it carries out the motivation analysis of collaborative information seeking for academic information in the Web2.0 environment. Meanwhile, the paper puts forward its aim and establishes the collaborative information seeking behavior model. This model includes four layers: demand analysis, search services, user interaction and outcome store and presentation. The construction of model makes us understand better the mechanism of academic information collaborative seeking and is helpful to retrieval system design.

World Wide Web (WWW) contains different kinds of information whether it be social, educational, historical, sports, news, financial, weather, technology, politics etc. Most of the people spend time on the internet to access data for information seeking purposes. Information provided on the web is available in different formats like in text format, image format or video format, and they can be accessed through different access interfaces. Accessing information from such a large place i.e. World Wide Web through so many websites would become a very cumbersome process, therefore, in this paper, we present a new method which will produce information based on the user input using appropriate keywords. The data will be retrieved from the internet using Data Mining approach without the need for rules and training of pages. The main focus will be to extract or retrieve data of a person like educational qualifications, gender, contact information, contributions in his work, his/her social nature, etc. The query to be searched on the platform or model should have meaningful keywords attached to it best describing the person or else data of some different person might be fetched.

© 2017, Springer Science+Business Media New York. 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.

The workshop on the evaluation of collaborative information retrieval and seeking (ECol) was held in conjunction with the 24th Conference on Information and Knowledge Management (CIKM) in Melbourne, Australia. The workshop featured three main elements. First, a keynote on the main dimensions, challenges, and opportunities in collaborative information retrieval and seeking by Chirag Shah. Second, an oral presentation session in which four papers were presented. Third, a discussion based on three seed research questions: (1) In what ways is collaborative search evaluation more challenging than individual interactive information retrieval (IIIR) evaluation? (2) Would it be possible and/or useful to standardise experimental designs and data for collaborative search evaluation? and (3) For evaluating collaborative search, can we leverage ideas from other tasks such as diversified search, subtopic mining and/or e-discovery? The discussion was intense and raised many points and issues, leading to the proposition that a new evaluation track focused on collaborative information retrieval/seeking tasks, would be worthwhile.

This paper presents an argument that information systems may support deeper engagement between readers and the text by realizing the capacity for readers to take more active roles while seeking information. Information systems could support collaborative information seeking by displaying shared annotations. Subsequent readers would be able to leverage the semantic information encoded within the shared annotations to interact with the text in more efficient and effective ways. Different types of collaboration and contexts in which it occurs will likely influence the ways in which shared annotations are used by readers and information systems to support collaborative information seeking. Directions for exploring the applications of shared annotations are discussed, concluding with four research questions for future work.

The development of systems to support collaborative information seeking is a challenging issue for many reasons. Besides the expected support of an individual user in tasks such as keyword based query formulation, relevance judgement, result set organization and summarization, the smooth exchange of search related information within a team of users seeking information has to be supported. This imposes strong requirements on visualization and interaction to enable user to easily trace and interpret the search activities of other team members and to jointly make sense of gathered information in order to satisfy an initial information need. In this paper, we briefly motivate specific requirements with a focus on collaborative professional search, review existing work and propose an adapted model for professional collaborative information seeking. In addition, we discuss the results of a use case study and point out major challenges in professional collaborative search. Finally, we briefly introduce a system that has been specifically developed to support collaborative technology search.

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, www.ezdl.de ) system towards supporting collaborative IS&S activities.

Collaborative search is concerned with how people work together to address a common information need. In this paper, we investigate two factors that may influence collaborative search behaviors: providing awareness information about collaborators’ prior activities, and the orientation of the shared task. For awareness, we examined two levels: an aware condition in which participants could see their collaborators’ prior activity in the system, and a non-aware condition in which they could only see their own history. For orientation, we investigated a task with an open set of goals compared to a recall-oriented task that asked participants to find as many relevant documents as possible. Forty-one participants in a laboratory study used a prototype system called ResultsSpace to complete an asynchronous collaborative search task with three simulated collaborators. We developed a novel set of measures for examining collaborative behavior, and found that participants who were aware of their collaborators’ prior actions issued more query terms in common with their collaborators and tended to avoid rating or viewing documents that collaborators had already rated as compared to the non-aware group. We also observed an interaction between awareness and task-orientation in terms of the number of unique documents found, suggesting that task orientation could change the direction of the effect of awareness on document space exploration.

The paper studied the game strategy decisions of alliance leader and members in collaborative information seeking. Based on basic Nash equilibrium model with complete information, it researched Bayesian-Nash equilibrium under incomplete information condition which further implied that the incompleteness of information had effected on the alliance leader’s compensation policy. Furthermore, it revealed a methodology to analyze the stability of Bayesian-Nash equilibrium and gave a detailed algorithm. It provided a framework to systematically explore the relationships between alliance leader and other members while solving work tasks in collaboration.

DOI : 10.1145/2914586.2914589; The notion of implicit (or explicit) collaborative information access refers to systems and practices allowing a group of users to unintentionally (respectively intentionally) seek, share and retrieve information to achieve similar (respectively shared) information-related goals. Despite an increasing adoption in social environments, collaboration behavior in information seeking and retrieval is mainly limited to small-sized groups, generally restricted to working spaces. Much remains to be learned about collaborative information seeking within open web social spaces. This paper is an attempt to better understand either implicit or explicit collaboration by studying Twitter, one of the most popular and widely used social networks. We study in particular the complex intertwinement of human interactions induced by both collaboration and social networking. We empirically explore explicit collaborative interactions based on focused conversation streams during two crisis. We identify structural patterns of temporally representative conversation subgraphs and represent their topics using Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) modeling. Our main findings suggest that: 1) the critical mass of collaboration is generally limited to small-sized flat networks, with or without an influential user, 2) users are active as members of weakly overlapping groups and engage in numerous collaborative search and sharing tasks dealing with different topics, and 3) collaborative group ties evolve within the time-span of conversations.

In this paper we propose a new ranking algorithm based on Swarm Intelligence, more specifically on the Ant Colony Optimization technique, to improve search engines’ performances and reduce the information overload by exploiting users’ collective behavior. We designed an online evaluation involving end users to test our algorithm in a real-world scenario dealing with informational queries. The development of a fully working prototype – based on the Wikipedia search engine – demonstrated promising preliminary results.

Since common ground is pivotal to collaboration, this paper proposes to define collaborative information seeking as the combined activity of information seeking and collaborative grounding. While information-seeking activities are necessary for collaborating actors to acquire new information, the activities involved in information seeking are often performed by varying subgroups of actors. Consequently, collaborative grounding is necessary to share information among collaborating actors and, thereby, establish and maintain the common ground necessary for their collaborative work. By focusing on the collaborative level, collaborative information seeking aims to avoid both individual reductionism and group reductionism, while at the same time recognizing that only some information and understanding need be shared.

Collaborative information behavior is an essential aspect of organizational work; however, we have very limited understanding of this behavior. Most models of information behavior focus on the individual seeker of information. In this paper, we report the results from two empirical studies that investigate aspects of collaborative information behavior in organizational settings. From these studies, we found that collaborative information behavior differs from individual information behavior with respect to how individuals interact with each other, the complexity of the information need, and the role of information technology. There are specific triggers for transitioning from individual to collaborative information behavior, including lack of domain expertise. The information retrieval technologies used affect collaborative information behavior by acting as important supporting mechanisms. From these results and prior work, we develop a model of collaborative information behavior along the axes of participant behavior, situational elements, and contextual triggers. We also present characteristics of collaborative information system including search, chat, and sharing. We discuss implications for the design of collaborative information retrieval systems and directions for future work.

Previous studies of users with visual impairments access to the web have focused on human-web interaction. This study explores the under investigated area of cross-modal collaborative information seeking (CCIS), that is, the challenges and opportunities that exist in supporting visually impaired (VI) users to take an effective part in collaborative web search tasks with sighted peers. We conducted an observational study to investigate the process with fourteen pairs of VI and sighted users in co-located and distributed settings. The study examined the effects of cross-modal collaborative interaction on the stages of the individual Information Seeking (IS) process. The findings showed that the different stages of the process were performed individually most of the time; however it was observed that some collaboration took place in the results exploration and management stages. The accessibility challenges faced by VI users affected their individual and collaborative interaction and also enforced certain points of collaboration. The paper concludes with some recommendations towards improving the accessibility of cross-modal collaborative search.

In this paper we present an overview over a doctoral thesis project emphasizing the planned research and methodology. The thesis project focuses on Collaborative Information Seeking (CIS) with a core interest in searcher heterogeneity. A special field of interest is the way how different personalities interact in a collaborative search scenario and if heterogeneous groups perform better or worse than homogenous groups. The goal is to provide a description of group performance in CIS and suggestions for the design of collaborative search tools.

Collaborative search systems require to make sense of the information to achieve shared goals and reduce additional costs. These systems include cognitive load and the cost to coordinate various events and participants. By applying game mechanics and dynamics to these collaborative systems we can intensify seeker engagement with this type of applications and its collaborative tasks. To the best of our knowledge the use of game design elements in non-gaming contexts has been so far discussed in a few research contexts, without ties to existing literature on Collaborative Information Seeking. This paper presents a set of elements to gamify collaborative search systems.

Recent research efforts have led to the creation of a number of systems that provide specialised support for collaborative web search. However, the use of these tools has not been studied outside of the laboratory, and as collaborative search becomes increasingly commonplace in everyday life, there is a need to understand whether the support provided by collaborative search systems fits with real-world information seeking practices. In the present study, we deployed two collaborative search tools to pairs of searchers with genuine information needs. We report findings from in-depth interviews conducted after searchers had used their assigned system for an extended period of time. Our findings show how system features were used and appropriated in pursuit of collaboration, throwing light on the way in which collaborative search is conducted in quotidian settings. Theoretical and practical implications of the results are discussed.

Interfaces to databases have traditionally been designed as single-user systems that hide other users and their activity. This paper aims to show that collaboration is an important aspect of searching online information retrieval (IR) systems that requires explicit computerised support. A number of systems offering varied approaches to supporting collaboration are surveyed and a structure for analysing the various aspects of collaboration is applied. The dominant form of collaboration in digital libraries is likely to be remote and asynchronous. Collaborative work in the digital library requires that both the search product and the search process can be captured and communicated. The ARIADNE system is introduced as an example of computerised support for collaboration between browsers.

This paper presents an investigation on collaborative information seeking process of team users from the aspect of search tactics. Through the investigation, we identified team search tactics as essential components of collaborative search process. In the study, theory from both information science and social psychology are explored in a preliminary user study to build a conceptual framework of team search tactics, which can be used to guide the design and evaluation of information systems in supporting collaborative information seeking.

In this paper, we present results of an on-line survey conducted in early 2010 to inquire about collaborative information seeking activities and behaviors in the context of Web searches. We recruited participants using the Amazon Mechanical Turk service to gather responses from people with a wide range of backgrounds. We present results about the frequency of collaborative Web searches, number of sessions involved, concurrency, location, collaborative group size, and communication methods used to collaborate. We draw comparisons with prior work and highlight collaborative search scenarios that are important for tools and systems to support.

In this position paper, we describe the unique challenges of collaborative information retrieval (MLCIR) in an environment where information access and visibility is not equal across all participants. We call this multi-level collaborative information retrieval, after the term used to describe an environment with differing classification levels. In contrast to traditional collaborative information retrieval, which focuses on technologies to facilitate dynamics in a group, MLCIR must be aware of the information flow in a group, making sure there is not information contamination and inadvertent disclosure of information, while still allowing for collaboration. We cover some of the challenges, and discuss impact on not just formal MLCIR domains, but also more traditional collaborative information seeking domains.

Social activities such as collaborative work and group negotiation can be an essential part of information seeking processes. However, they are not sufficiently supported by today's information systems as they focus on individual users working with PCs. Reality-based UIs with their increased emphasis on social, tangible, and surface computing have the potential to tackle this problem. By blending characteristics of real-world interaction and social qualities with the advantages of virtual computer systems, they inherently change the possibilities for collaboration, but until now this phenomenon has not been explored sufficiently. Therefore, this paper presents an experimental user study that aims at clarifying the impact such reality-based UIs and its characteristics have on collaborative information seeking processes. Two different UIs have been developed for the purpose of this study. One is based on an interactive multi-touch tabletop in combination with on-screen tangibles, therefore qualifying as a reality-based UI, while the other interface uses three synchronized PCs each controlled by keyboard and mouse. A comparative user study with 75 participants in groups of three was carried out to observe fundamental information seeking tasks for co-located collaboration. The study shows essential differences of emerging group behavior, especially in terms of role perception and seeking strategies depending on the two different UIs.

It is typically expected that when people work together, they can often accomplish goals that are difficult or even impossible for individuals. We consider this notion of the group achieving more than the sum of all individuals' achievements to be the synergic effect in collaboration. Similar expectation exists for people working in collaboration for information seeking tasks. We, however, lack a methodology and appropriate evaluation metrics for studying and measuring the synergic effect. In this paper we demonstrate how to evaluate this effect and discuss what it means to various collaborative information seeking (CIS) situations. We present a user study with four different conditions: single user, pair of users at the same computer, pair of users at different computers and co-located, and pair of users remotely located. Each of these individuals or pairs was given the same task of information seeking and usage for the same amount of time. We then combined the outputs of single independent users to form artificial pairs, and compared against the real pairs. Not surprisingly, participants using different computers (co-located or remotely located) were able to cover more information sources than those using a single computer (single user or a pair). But more interestingly, we found that real pairs with their own computers (co-located or remotely located) were able to cover more unique and useful information than that of the artificially created pairs. This indicates that those working in collaboration achieved something greater and better than what could be achieved by adding independent users, thus, demonstrating the synergic effect. Remotely located real teams were also able to formulate a wider range of queries than those pairs that were co-located or artificially created. This shows that the collaborators working remotely were able to achieve synergy while still being able to think and work independently. Through the experiments and measurements presented here, we have also contributed a unique methodology and an evaluation metric for CIS., 34th International ACM SIGIR Conference on Research and Development in Information Retrieval

The paper set out to provide a mechanism of contract design in collaborative information seeking(CIS) under fuzzy condition. It studied the service provider's investment decision in CIS project and investigated how did enterprise induce the service providers' behaviors by tuning its own intelligence quality standard in contract, which on the separate equilibrium path. It also constructed a fault tree model in CIS that could analyze the reliability of the equilibrium in the signaling game model under fuzzy condition.

User-centeredness has become an essential feature of information systems directly interacting with a user. In this paper we emphasize the importance of a user as an active content creator and contributor, community, and their synergy to achieve better user-centeredness in personalized Web search services. For this, we realize individual-community collaborative scheme integrating information search and sharing, and thus benefiting from both individual and community activities. Here we show the details of the scheme, including expertise-based information co-evaluation and collaborative search.

Περιέχει το πλήρες κείμενο Evaluation of digital libraries assesses their effectiveness, quality and overall impact. In this paper we present a novel, multi-level logging framework that will provide complete coverage of the different aspects of DL usage for user-system interactions. Based on this framework, we can analyse for various DL stakeholders the logging data according to their specific interests. In addition, analysis tools and a freely accessible log data repository will yield synergies and sustainability in DL evaluation and encourage a community for DL evaluation by providing for discussion on a common ground.

Past research into information seeking has generally focused on the information seeker as an individual, and examined the activities, roles, behaviours, methods and processes an individual uses to locate and gather information. Little work has been done examining the information seeker as a group, that is, collaborative information seeking. The goal of the research described in this paper is to examine collaborative information seeking, suggest a conceptual model for collaborative information seeking and relate that model to current information technology initiatives. The potential value of collaborative information seeking can be seen (not limited to) in such information technology initiatives as computer supported collaborative work (CSCW), knowledge management, and electronic commerce.

Digital Libraries and Information Access. Edited by G. G. Chowdhury and Schubert Foo. Chicago: Neal-Schuman, 2012. 235 p. $99.95 (ISBN: 978-1-55570-914-3). Since their emergence more than two decades ago, digital libraries have been developed in response to emerging and evolving researcher access needs. Digital libraries themselves have been the subject of ongoing research primarily undertaken by computer scientists, information scientists, and librarians, in addition to researchers from other fields. The definition and model of a digital library have likewise been approached from many different perspectives throughout a growing body of literature specific to their study. Early definitions focused on considering a digital library as an organization that provides access to digital works and has some obligation to preserve these works. Today, digital libraries have in many instances grown in scope and purpose with various projects seeking to better understand user interactions, facilitate collaborative information seeking activities, and refine how metadata are ingested, integrated, and provided. Current digital library projects might address emerging legal, ethical, and policy issues pertaining to information access, incorporate new resource types such as research outputs and data, and take advantage of developments in information storage to optimize management and functionality. Literature about digital libraries has grown significantly since they became a research focus, with more than 8,000 conference papers and journal articles published to date, along with many books and other resources. Chowdhury and Foo have contributed a new reference monograph on the subject, international in scope, which includes citations of exceptional breadth and depth that draw from the now substantial extant body of literature published about digital libraries. In Digital Libraries and Information Access, the editors provide a compilation of investigations into topics that range from the foundations of digital library development (architecture and design, understanding user interaction), to current advocacy issues (understanding digital library needs in developing nations, fostering social inclusivity, supporting open access), to detailed case studies (aligning different approaches to subject metadata, assessing information access features across select digital library sites). Given its inclusive scope and the potential that each chapter offers for continued research exploration, this title could easily be used as a textbook for students of information science while still offering current digital library practitioners a useful overview of the state of digital library research today. Several chapters address the importance of better understanding user interactions in digital libraries, an area of growing research. In chapter 8, Wilson and Maceviciute note that the topics of usability and user studies have indeed expanded to compose more than a third of the literature on digital libraries. They note that researchers are increasingly focused on understanding both general and specific user activities along with design aspects related to their behavior and comparing different research methods to assess this behavior. They encourage further exploration of user interactions in digital libraries, especially as they assert that "the digital library seems likely to be the dominant form of organized information" (124). They suggest means for modeling user behavior in digital libraries beyond general models of information behavior, noting that the actions users take within a given digital library can be constrained by the interface and functionality with which they are presented. Chowdhury and Foo, in chapter 4, discuss the role that interface design has on user interactions and acknowledge that visualization techniques in particular hold great and unrealized potential for enhancing user interactions, especially as digital libraries expand to include more and different types of content. …

This paper presents an outline of models of information seeking and other aspects of information behaviour, showing the relationship between communication and information behaviour in general with information seeking and information searching in information retrieval systems. It is suggested that these models address issues at various levels of information behaviour and that they can be related by envisaging a ‘nesting’ of models. It is also suggested that, within both information seeking research and information searching research, alternative models address similar issues in related ways and that the models are complementary rather than conflicting. Finally, an alternative, problem‐solving model is presented, which, it is suggested, provides a basis for relating the models in appropriate research strategies.

In this paper we argue a user has to be in the center of information seeking task, as in any other task where the user is involved. In addition, an essential part of user-centrism is considering a user not only in his/her individual scope, but expanding it to the user's community participation quintessence. Through our research we make an endeavor to develop a holistic approach from how to harnesses relevance feedback from users in order to estimate their interests, construct user profiles reflecting those interests to applying them for information acquisition in online collaborative information seeking context. Here we discuss a human-centric integrated approach for Web information search and sharing incorporating the important user-centric elements, namely a user's individual context and 'social' factor realized with collaborative contributions and co-evaluations, into Web information search.