Supporting Collaborative Information Seeking and Searching in Distributed Environments

In various work domains, the collaborative performance of a work-task by a team can lead to a shared information need required to fulfill this task. Many empirical studies identified collaborative information seeking and searching (IS&S) as everyday work patterns in order to solve a shared information need and to benefit from the diverse expertise and experience of the team members. This paper presents first empirical results in an ongoing research project: We report on a pilot user study that investigates the collaborative IS&S practices of three work groups in academic and industrial research facilities. The aim of the conducted pilot study was to capture the use of software technologies for realizing collaboration, information seeking and sharing in real-world work settings. We discuss resulting design implications as guideline for extending the ezDL 1 system towards supporting collaborative IS&S activities.