Collaborative information seeking (CIS) is a field of research that involves studying situations, motivations, and methods for people working in collaborative groups for information seeking projects, as well as building systems for supporting such activities. Such projects often involve information searching or information retrieval (IR), information gathering, and information sharing. Beyond that, CIS can extend to collaborative information synthesis and collaborative sense-making.
Background Seeking for information is often considered a solo activity, but there are many situations that call for people working together for information seeking. Such situations are typically complex in nature, and involve working through several sessions exploring, evaluating, and gathering relevant information. Take for example, a couple going on a trip. They have the same goal, and in order to accomplish their goal, they need to seek out several kinds of information, including flights, hotels, and sightseeing. This may involve them working together over multiple sessions, exploring and collecting useful information, and collectively making decisions that help them move toward their common goal.
It is a common knowledge that collaboration is either necessary or highly desired in many activities that are complex or difficult to deal with for an individual. Despite its natural appeal and situational necessity, collaboration in information seeking is an understudied domain. The nature of the available information and its role in our lives have changed significantly, but the methods and tools that are used to access and share that information in collaboration have remained largely unaltered. People still use general-purpose systems such as email and IM for doing CIS projects, and there is a lack of specialized tools and techniques to support CIS explicitly.
There are also several models to explain information seeking and information behavior,Reddy, M. and Jansen, B. J. (2007) A model for understanding collaborative information behavior in context: A study of two healthcare teams, Information Processing & Management. 44 (1), 256-273. but the areas of collaborative information seeking and collaborative information behavior remain understudied. On the theory side, Shah has presented C5 ModelShah, C. (2008, June 20). Toward collaborative information seeking (CIS). Position Paper in Proceedings of Collaborative Exploratory Search workshop at JCDL 2008, Pittsburgh, PA.Shah, C., & Leeder, C. (2016). Exploring Collaborative Work Among Graduate Students Through the C5 Model of Collaboration: A Diary Study. Journal of Information Science (JIS), 42(5), pp. 609-629. for studying collaborative situations, including information seeking. On the practical side, a few specialized systems for supporting CIS have emerged in the recent past, but their usage and evaluations have underwhelmed. Despite such limitations, the field of CIS has been getting a lot of attention lately, and several promising theories and tools have come forth. Multiple reviews of CIS related literature are written by Shah.Shah, C (2010). Collaborative Information Seeking: A Literature Review, in Anne Woodsworth (ed.) Advances in Librarianship (Advances in Librarianship, Volume 32), Emerald Group Publishing Limited, pp.3-33. Shah's bookShah, C (2012). Collaborative Information Seeking: The Art and Science of Making the Whole Greater than the Sum of All. The Information Retrieval Series, Vol. 34. Springer. . provides a comprehensive review of this field, including theories, models, systems, evaluation, and future research directions. Other books in this area include one by Morris and Teevan,Morris, M. R. & Teevan, J. (2010). Collaborative Web Search: Who, What, Where, When, and Why. San Rafael, CA: Morgan & Claypool Series on Information Concepts, Retrieval, and Services (Ed. Gary Marchionini). as well as Foster's book on collaborative information behavior.Foster, J. (2010). Collaborative Information Behavior: User Engagement and Communication Sharing. IGI Global: Hershey, PA. and Hansen, Shah, and Klas's edited book on CIS.Hansen, P., Shah, C., & Klas, C.-P. (Eds.) (2015). Collaborative information seeking: Best practices, new domains, new thoughts. The Computer-Supported Cooperative Work (CSCW) series, Berlin, Germany: Springer. . (226 pages)
Theories Depending upon what one includes or excludes while talking about CIS, we have many or hardly any theories. If we consider the past work on the groupware systems, many interesting insights can be obtained about people working on collaborative projects, the issues they face, and the guidelines for system designers. One of the notable works is by Grudin, who laid out eight design principles for developers of groupware systems.
The discussion below is primarily based on some of the recent works in the field of computer supported cooperative work CSCW, collaborative IR, and CIS.
Definitions and terminology The literature is filled with works that use terms such as collaborative information retrieval,Fidel, R., Bruce, H., Pejtersen, A. M., Dumais, S. T., Grudin, J., and Poltrock, S. (2000a). Collaborative Information Retrieval (CIR). The New Review of Information Behaviour Research, pages 235–247. social searching,Evans, B. M. and Chi, E. H. (2008). Towards a model of understanding social search. In Proceedings of JCDL 2008 Workshop on Collaborative Exploratory Search, Pittsburgh, PA. concurrent search,Baecker, R. M. (1995). Readings in Human-Computer Interaction: Towards the Year 2000. Morgan Kaufmann. collaborative exploratory search,Pickens, J. and Golovchinsky, G. (2007). Collaborative Exploratory Search. In Pro- ceedings of Workshop on Human-Computer Interaction and Information Retrieval, pages 21–22, MIT CSAIL, Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA. co-browsing,Gerosa, L., Giordani, A., Ronchetti, M., Soller, A., and Stevens, R. (2004). Symmetric synchronous collaborative navigation. In Proceedings of the 2004 IADIS International WWW/Internet Conference, pages 1–7, Madrid, Spain. collaborative information behavior,Talja, S. and Hansen, P. (2006). Information sharing. New Directions in Human Information Behavior. Springer. collaborative information synthesis, and collaborative information seeking,Shah, C. (2008). Toward Collaborative Information Seeking (CIS). In Proceedings of JCDL 2008 Workshop on Collaborative Exploratory Search, Pittsburgh, PA. which are often used interchangeably.
There are several definitions of such related or similar terms in the literature. For instance, FosterFoster, J. (2006). Collaborative information seeking and retrieval. Annual Review of Information Science and Technology (ARIST), 40:329–356. defined collaborative IR as "the study of the systems and practices that enable individuals to collaborate during the seeking, searching, and retrieval of information." ShahShah, C. (2009). Lessons and challenges for Collaborative Information Seeking (CIS) systems developers. In Proceedings of GROUP 2009 Workshop on Collaborative Information Behavior, Sanibel Island, Florida. defined CIS as a process of collaboratively seeking information that is "defined explicitly among the participants, interactive, and mutually beneficial." While there is still a lack of a definition or a terminology that is universally accepted, but most agree that CIS is an active process, as opposed to collaborative filtering, where a system connects the users based on their passive involvement (e.g., buying similar products on Amazon).
Models of collaboration Foley and Smeaton defined two key aspects of collaborative information seeking as division of labor and the sharing of knowledge. Division of labor allows collaborating searchers to tackle larger problems by reducing the duplication of effort (e.g., finding documents that one's collaborator has already discovered). The sharing of knowledge allows searchers to influence each other's activities as they interact with the retrieval system in pursuit of their (often evolving) information need. This influence can occur in real time if the collaborative search system supports it, or it can occur in a turn-taking, asynchronous manner if that is how interaction is structured.
Teevan et al. characterized two classes of collaboration, task-based vs. trait-based. Task-based collaboration corresponds to intentional collaboration; trait-based collaboration facilitates the sharing of knowledge through inferred similarity of information need.
Situations, motivations, and methods One of the important issues to study in CIS is the instance, reason, and the methods behind a collaboration. For instance, Morris,Morris, M. R. (2008). A survey of collaborative web search practices. In Proceedings of SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pages 1657–1660, Florence, Italy. using a survey with 204 knowledge workers at a large technology company found that people often like and want to collaborate, but they do not find specialized tools to help them in such endeavors. Some of the situations for doing collaborative information seeking in this survey were travel planning, shopping, and literature search. Shah,Shah, C (2010). Working in Collaboration - What, Why, and How? Proceedings of Collaborative Information Retrieval workshop at CSCW 2010. Savannah, GA: February 7, 2010. similarly, using personal interviews, identified three main reasons why people collaborate. Requirement/setup. Sometimes a group of people are "forced" to collaborate. Example includes a merger between two companies. Division of labor. Working together may help the participants to distribute the workload. Example includes a group of students working on a class project. Diversity of skills. Often people get together because they could not individually possess the required set of skills. Example includes co-authorship, where different authors bring different set of skills to the table.
As far as the tools and/or methods for CIS are concerned, both Morris and Shah found that email is still the most used tool. Other popular methods are face-to-face meetings, IM, and phone or conference calls. In general, the choice of the method or tool for our respondents depended on their situation (co-located or remote), and objective (brainstorming or working on independent parts).
Space-time organization of CIS systems and methods The classical way of organizing collaborative activities is based on two factors: location and time. Recently Hansen & Jarvelin and Golovchinsky, Pickens, & BackGolovchinsky, G., Pickens, J., and Back, M. (2008b). A taxonomy of collaboration in online information seeking. In Proceedings of JCDL 2008 Workshop on Collaborative Exploratory Search, Pittsburgh, PA. also classified approaches to collaborative IR using these two dimensions of space and time. See "Browsing is a Collaborative Process", where the authors depict various library activities on these two dimensions.Twidale, M. B. and Nichols, D. M. (1996). Collaborative browsing and visualisation of the search process. In Proceedings of Aslib, volume 48, pages 177–182.
As we can see from this figure, the majority of collaborative activities in conventional libraries are co-located and synchronous, whereas collaborative activities relating to digital libraries are more remote and synchronous. Social information filtering, or collaborative filtering, as we saw earlier, is a process benefitting from other users' actions in the past; thus, it falls under asynchronous and mostly remote domain. These days email also serves as a tool for doing asynchronous collaboration among users who are not co-located. Chat or IM (represented as 'internet' in the figure) helps to carry out synchronous and remote collaboration.