The goal of this research is to develop techniques and systems that help people solve information problems that are complex, general, or ongoing and when information seeking takes place over multiple intervals or in collaboration with other people. The approach is to first study how people seek information and interpret results of searches as they use multiple systems over time and in collaboration with emphasis given to managing and optionally sharing result sets and items. Second, based on these initial investigations, systems are designed that support dynamic search and visualization and can serve both as a personal information manager and a group information manager. Third, these tools are evaluated in field and laboratory settings. The research is linked to educational theories of active learning and is embedded in university student and research team information needs over multiple months. Students play an active role in this project by participating in the design and evaluation of the information seeking systems.
The results of this research will provide guidance for designers of the next generation of systems that support a full range of complex information seeking needs. The project also contributes specific open source tools that people can easily adopt as plug-ins to popular web browsing software. Publications, software and other information items will be widely disseminated, including via the project Web site (www.ils.unc.edu/infoseek/). This work will thus have broad impact on Internet-based information activities in schools, homes, offices, and research laboratories.
Search engines such as Google, Yahoo!, and Bing help millions of people each day to find specific information useful to their personal and work needs. These services are not as helpful when information needs are complex, general, or ongoing and when information seeking takes place over multiple intervals or in collaboration with other people. These more difficult information-seeking challenges involve information needs that are open-ended, ongoing, comprehensive, and multi-faceted and search activities that are exploratory, discovery-oriented, and often collaborative. This research addressed two critical aspects of these challenges: support for information seeking over multiple search sessions and support for search embedded in explicit collaboration settings. Such information seeking is typical in research, professional work, and educational situations. Whereas most information retrieval research focuses on query formulation and reformulation, this work was novel in that it emphasized results examination, manipulation, and reuse. Three specific outcomes came out of this work. First, a framework for understanding multiple-session, collaborative search was developed and evaluated. This framework takes into account the roles that awareness of collaborators play in conducting multi-session search. It advances our theoretical understanding of how people search and also informs design practice for tomorrow’s search systems. Second, two search systems were developed. Coagmento was developed and is now deployed as an open source tool for people to use to support multisession collaborative search. A second system, ResultsSpace, was developed as an experimental platform that allows different user interface features and data sets to be used in future research. Third, several user studies were conducted that informed the information-seeking framework as well as the development of the two systems and future systems. This work built on more than a decade of designing and evaluating highly interactive search systems, took a user-centered design approach that begins with a prototype rooted in best practice to engage typical users in a multi-month participatory design process, and evaluated the resulting system in group information seeking and management settings. The work had impact by advancing the theory of information seeking beyond the single search session and providing search tools that people can use in web searching to improve professional and learning productivity. The project also involved a post-doctoral fellow, three doctoral students, four masters students, and six undergraduate students who developed research skills that have already led to career opportunities after graduation.
