Collaborative Information Retrieval

1. Collaborative Information Retrieval Raya Fidel and Harry Bruce School of Library and Information Science University of Washington

2. 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

3. 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

4. Information and team work • Identifying the team’s 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 ?

5. Shared information need

6. 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….. ?

7. 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)

8. 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)

9. 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

11. 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

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

13. Framework for Work Analysis

14. 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

15. 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

16. Second Step: Evaluation Framework for System Evaluation

17. 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?

18. 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?

19. 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