People intuitively use search engines to look for health information. However, people take an exploratory search approach to find the information in some scenarios, and current search engines do not support these cases well. This exploratory information seeking behaviour is rarely investigated by researchers in the context of online consumer health information. We report on a qualitative study ...

The theory of Radical Change, which is based on the digital age principles of interactivity, connectivity, and access, is suggested as a lens to reexamine existing research on youth information-seeking behavior in the digital environment. After a brief review of research meta-analyses, which often point to defi cits in youth information-seeking behavior, questions that emerge from this research...

This paper is intended to provide an informal assessment of the theoretical foundations and methodological applications that have been used to study collaborative information seeking. The review of previous studies on collaborative information seeking reveals that most studies have been predominantly descriptive and exploratory in nature, and little has been based on existing conceptual or theo...

Most social Q&A sites are designed to support solo searchers who access the aggregated opinions of other users, and ask and answer questions of their own. The purpose of this paper is to show how users in one social Q&A community defy system constraints to engage in brief, informal episodes of collaborative information seeking called microcollaborations. A brief literature review is presented, ...

Purpose – The column explores the potential of personal information management (PIM) and reference management. This contribution focuses on collaboration: the issues that need to be addressed in planning, the human component in collaborative information seeking, and issues for research by librarians. Design/methodology/approach – The column is written against the background of research from inf...

An important aspect of collaborative information seeking (CIS) is making sense of the information found, i.e., collaborative sensemaking. We conducted an ethnographic study of the CIS activities of healthcare providers in a hospital emergency department to gain a conceptual understanding of why and how sensemaking occurs during CIS activities. Based on these findings, we discuss a framework of ...

Employees’ information seeking behavior is an important aspect of knowledge management. However, the extant literature has dominantly focused on information sharing and transfer. The limited literature on information seeking has taken a social network perspective as a main theoretical lens and focused on task performance information seeking. In this study, we propose an alternative theoretical ...

It is now recognised that people often collaborate when completing information seeking tasks, and a number of specialised tools and systems have been developed to support such behaviour. Such systems often allow for distribution of search results among collaborators. The goal of this division of labour is to enable concurrent work while also preventing redundancy in results distribution. This p...

Two studies are presented that investigate information seeking behaviour on the Internet. In Study One, soccer fans’ information seeking on the World Wide Web (WWW) is investigated. In Study Two, access rates to a cancer information website are analysed. It is tentatively argued that there is a tendency for people to access information more commonly avoided in ‘real life’, although in the case ...

Sarah Robbins is Web Services Coordinator, Debra Engel is Associate Dean of Public Services, and Christina Kulp is Sciences Librarian at University of Oklahoma Libraries; e-mail: [email protected], [email protected], [email protected], respectively. © Sarah Robbins, Debra Engel, and Christina Kulp Studies of information-seeking behaviors are common in the professional literature for library and informati...