Design engineering projects are reliant on collaborative effort among multiple individuals and/or departments through sharing experiments and data and collaboration on analysis of data and results. Information literacy is one of the competencies that design engineering students are expected to acquire through these courses, given that fact that students with an undergraduate Engineering degree ...

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 ...

This article examines the information seeking behavior and meaningmaking in virtual play spaces by employing the example of one such space. The researcher examines the means by which game players get the information needed to succeed in a game through the lens of everyday life information seeking, and how they make meanings in the play space through the lens of the dramaturgical approach. While...

When searching for information, people often seek help from others. However, while people can benefit from communicating with others, they can usually satisfy their information needs, to some degree, without help. Because establishing explicit collaborations is often seen as onerous, there are many missed opportunities where shared experiences could save time and effort. In this work, we propos...

Navigating through the ever-changing information space is becoming increasingly difficult. Social navigation support is a technique for guiding users to interesting and relevant information by leveraging the browsing behavior of past users. Effect of social navigation support on users’ information seeking behavior has been studied mostly from conceptual basis or under natural experiments. In th...

In this paper we look at some of the problems in interacting with best-match retrieval systems. In particular, we examine the areas of interaction, some investigations of the complexity and breadth of interaction and attempts to categorise user's information seeking behaviour. We suggest that one of the diiculties of traditional IR systems in supporting information seeking is the way the inform...

This paper outlines a broad research agenda aimed at examining the manner in which individual differences in information seeking behavior interact with the search task to affect search outcomes. As part of this agenda, we describe specific experimentation that will assess the impact of both Need for Cognition (the tendency to elaborate upon, structure and evaluate information) and Selfand Other...

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...

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...

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...