BetteR exploRAtoRy SeARCH tHRougH SoCiAl BookMARking

Gail described here illustrate some of the challenges for collaborative information seeking. John is a middle-aged accountant who recently underwent successful surgery for colon cancer. He knows that he can have a long life as a cancer survivor as long as he maintains a healthy lifestyle. He continues to learn about the disease, joins online support groups, and seeks tools that allow him to find and organize information about colon cancer. As part of his support group, he offers encouragement and advice to others. John joins an online community to identify a group of peers—fellow cancer survivors, researchers, doctors, and other motivated and knowledgeable people—with whom he can coordinate his ongoing investigations. Searching independently, they form a trusted search community 5 that makes automatically generated recommendations more coherent since the community has similar information needs. They also form synchronous collaborations in small groups to explore and share information about new developments and track ongoing research in the field. John is lobbying his insurance company and hospital to expand their post-treatment counseling services to include online search help from registered nurses who specialize P eople often work together when searching for information, but traditional information-seeking systems do not support such behavior, causing people to adopt workarounds such as over-the-shoulder surfing or sending links by e-mail to compensate for a lack of adequate tools. 1 This observation has led several research groups to explore various aspects of collaboration in support of information seeking. 2-4 The goal of this research is to create tools that support collaborative search based on explicitly shared information needs. Collaboration and information seeking can assume many forms. The needs and search activities of John and An examination of the roles and dimensions of collaborative search reveals new opportunities for information-seeking support tools.