In modern organizations, work is increasingly organized around teams. One important aspect of collaborative team work is information seeking. However, there is little empirical understanding of how team members collaborate to find needed information, nor tools to support this type of collaboration.

This project consisted of a series of three studies aimed at the exploration and support of collaborative information seeking: a) The development and examination of a prototype multi-user search engine; b) A quantitative analysis of a survey administered to academic researchers, regarding their collaborative information seeking practices; and c) A field study of collaborative information seeking practices with patient care teams in a hospital emergency department. The latter study was supported by a grant from the University of Missouri Research Board.

References

• Krishnappa, R. (2005). Multi-User Search Engine (MUSE): Supporting Collaborative Information Seeking and Retrieval. Masters Thesis, Information Science and Technology, University of Missouri - Rolla, http://campus.mst.edu/lite/theses/2005_1_krishnappa.pdf.
• Spence, P. (2005). Collaborative Information Seeking: A Study of a Patient Care Team in the Emergency Department . Masters Thesis, Information Science and Technology, University of Missouri - Rolla, http://campus.mst.edu/lite/theses/2005_2_spence_patricia.pdf
• Spence, P.R., Reddy, M.C., & Hall, R.H. (2005). A Survey of Collaborative Information Seeking Practices of Academic Researchers.Proceedings of the International ACM SIGGROUP Conference on Supporting Group Work, 85 – 88.