Getting to Local Information: The Role of Different Costs

Finding information can cost a significant amount of time, even when the information is already stored on the user's local computer system. There is significant research aimed at reducing these time costs, but little research into exactly what these costs are or how they impact people's use of tools and technologies to access local information. This thesis presents a methodology for investigating such issues, and uses the methodology to report empirical results on ways people access local information and how these ways tie to different types of costs. Our results fill in gaps in what is known about the problem of accessing local information, thereby helping to inform technological solutions to the problem.