Communication processes between governments and businesses are increasingly networked. This paper increases our understanding of the information seeking behavior of businesses in the Government-to-Business domain. We conducted a quantitative study among Small and Medium-sized Enterprises in the Netherlands to discover source-channel interaction. The results provided several interactions regardi...

In an interactive information-seeking environment, it is important to consider more user-centric notion of relevance, which includes motivational and affective relevance. In this article we introduce the notion of group’s affective relevance for collaborative information seeking. We explore different ways of measuring it and examine how these measures are related to the performance of teams. In...

Several authors have proposed information seeking as an appropriate perspective for studying software maintenance activities. However, there is little research in the literature describing holistic information-seeking models in this context. Additionally, in the one instance where an information-seeking model has been proposed, the empirical evidence presented in support of that model is extrem...

The complexity involved in the understanding of human collaboration leads to the design of novel approaches for its study. Particularly, in the context of information seeking little is known about collaboration, indeed only during the last years the study of collaborative information seeking (CIS) has become a subject of interest in the research community. Considering the lack of appropriate me...

This paper describes the current status of my doctoral research. In my work I am developing a novel approach to studying division of workload in collaborative tasks, with a particular focus on exploring division of labour in collaborative information seeking. My approach is based on the application of an economic game to the problem of workload division. Using this game as a theoretical and emp...

Professional search in an engineering context includes users on different stages from novice to expert. We discuss how searching as learning can help to understand searching in a larger information seeking, workspace, and learning environment, giving users the tools and understanding to become experts over time. We present some findings of user interaction with engineering domain retrieval syst...

The study investigated the process of information channel selection of Jewish studies scholars in Israel according to two theoretical frameworks, the ‘cost–benefit ratio’ that focused on the quality of the information provided by the channel and the ‘least effort principle’ that focused on the accessibility of the channel. The study sought to identify which of the two parameters, quality of inf...

In this article, I examine the cultural interpretations of degedege, an indigenous illness commonly recognized by the Zaramo people of coastal Tanzania as life threatening. Drawing on the narratives of three bereaved parents who lost a child to degedege, I analyze the contextual and circumstantial factors involved in these parents’ negotiation of the identity of an illness and in their subseque...

The present study provides a comparative analysis of sexual-minority and heterosexual emerging adult women's experiences seeking support for sexual issues from parents and friends. Participants included 229 college women (88 sexual-minority women; 141 heterosexual women), ranging from 18 to 25 years of age, who provided written responses to an inquiry about a time they went to friends and paren...

This proposal describes research I am currently conducting into the implementation of a healthcare information system into local clinics in Nyanga and Mitchell's Plain, two disadvantaged areas in the Cape Region of South Africa. The research has two aims. First, I am seeking to address a current serious deficiency of detailed empirical studies into the implementation of information systems in s...