Today’s complex, information-intensive problems often require people to work together. Mostly these tasks go far beyond simply searching together; they include information lookup, sharing, synthesis, and decision-making. In addition, they all have an end-goal that is mutually beneficial to all parties involved. Such “collaborative information seeking” (CIS) projects typically last several sessions and the participants all share an intention to contribute and benefit. Not surprisingly, these processes are highly interactive. Shah focuses on two individually well-understood notions: collaboration and information seeking, with the goal of bringing them together to show how it is a natural tendency for humans to work together on complex tasks. The first part of his book introduces the general notions of collaboration and information seeking, as well as related concepts, terminology, and frameworks; and thus provides the reader with a comprehensive treatment of the concepts underlying CIS. The second part of the book details CIS as a standalone domain. A series of frameworks, theories, and models are introduced to provide a conceptual basis for CIS. The final part describes several systems and applications of CIS, along with their broader implications on other fields such as computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) and human-computer interaction (HCI). With this first comprehensive overview of an exciting new research field, Shah delivers to graduate students and researchers in academia and industry an encompassing description of the technologies involved, state-of-the-art results, and open challenges as well as research opportunities.

"This book coordinates and integrates current research and practices in the area of collaborative information behavior, providing information on empirical research findings, theoretical frameworks, and models relevant to understanding collaborative information behavior"--Provided by publisher.

Compiled by world- class leaders in the field of collaborative information retrieval and search (CIS), this book centres on the notion that information seeking is not always a solitary activity and working in collaboration to perform information-seeking tasks should be studied and supported. Covering aspects of theories, models, and applications the book is divided in three parts: · Best Practices and Studies: providing an overview of current knowledge and state-of-the-art in the field. · New Domains: covers some of the new and exciting opportunities of applying CIS · New Thoughts: focuses on new research directions by scholars from academia and industry from around the world. Collaborative Information Seeking provides a valuable reference for student, teachers, and researchers interested in the area of collaborative work, information seeking/retrieval, and human-computer interaction.

"Bringing together scholarship and pedagogy from a multiple of perspectives and disciplines to provide a broader and more complex understanding of information literacy and suggests ways that teaching and library faculty can work together to respond to the rapidly changing and dynamic information landscape"--Provided by publisher.

This book brings together three great motifs of the network society: the seeking and using of information by individuals and groups; the creation and application of knowledge in organizations; and the fundamental transformation of these activities as they are enacted on the Internet and the World Wide Web. Of the three, the study of how individuals and groups seek information probably has the longest history, beginning with the early "information needs and uses" studies soon after the Second World War. The study of organizations as knowledge-based social systems is much more recent, and really gained momentum only within the last decade or so. The study of the World Wide Web as information and communication media is younger still, but has generated tremendous excitement, partly because it has the potential to reconfigure the ways in which people seek information and use knowledge, and partly because it offers new methods of analyzing and measuring how in fact such information and knowledge work gets done. As research endeavors, these streams overlap and share conceptual constructs, perspectives, and methods of analysis. Although these overlaps and shared concerns are sometimes apparent in the published research, there have been few attempts to connect these ideas explicitly and identify cross-disciplinary themes. This book is an attempt to fill this void. The three authors of this book possess contrasting backgrounds and thus adopt complementary vantage points to observe information seeking and knowledge work.

Constructive partnerships between academic librarians and faculty play a crucial role in effectively assessing and improving information literacy efforts. Collaboration is not just a nice idea; it is essential to improving the value of library services, personnel, and instruction. Here, highly respected editors Thomas P. Mackey and Trudi E. Jacobson, whose previous works include Information Literacy Collaborations That Work (2007) and Using Technology to Teach Information Literacy (2008), explore innovative collaborative assessment strategies designed specifically for information literacy programs and courses. All of the contributions to the book are co-written by faculty-librarian teams that have successfully worked together to develop assessment strategies across a wide range of disciplines, including business, political science, education, adult learning programs, and the humanities. Saving you countless hours on course or accreditation preparation, each chapter includes a detailed literature review, a model for practical implementation, a discussion of the partnership process, and an examination of assessment data. The teams also share guidance for overcoming a variety of collaborative obstacles and challenges, and report on how their assessment process significantly improved student learning outcomes. Framed in a practical real-world context, this invaluable new resource provides a clear set of best practices to help librarians and faculty work together to initiate new information literacy assessment efforts or to improve established programs in their own institutions.

This volume summarizes the author’s work on social information seeking (SIS), and at the same time serves as an introduction to the topic. Sometimes also referred to as social search or social information retrieval, this is a relatively new area of study concerned with the seeking and acquiring of information from social spaces on the Internet. It involves studying situations, motivations, and methods involved in seeking and sharing of information in participatory online social sites, such as Yahoo! Answers, WikiAnswers, and Twitter, as well as building systems for supporting such activities. The first part of the book introduces various foundational concepts, including information seeking, social media, and social networking. As such it provides the necessary basis to then discuss how those aspects could intertwine in different ways to create methods, tools, and opportunities for supporting and leveraging SIS. Next, Part II discusses the social dimension and primarily examines the online question-answering activity. Part III then emphasizes the collaborative aspect of information seeking, and examines what happens when social and collaborative dimensions are considered together. Lastly, Part IV provides a synthesis by consolidating methods, systems, and evaluation techniques related to social and collaborative information seeking. The book is completed by a list of challenges and opportunities for both theoretical and practical SIS work. The book is intended mainly for researchers and graduate students looking for an introduction to this new field, as well as developers and system designers interested in building interactive information retrieval systems or social/community-driven interfaces.

As the 21st century begins, we are faced with opportunities and challenges of available technology as well as pressured to create strategic and tactical plans for future technology. Worldwide, IT professionals are sharing and trading concepts and ideas for effective IT management, and this co-operation is what leads to solid IT management practices. This volume is a collection of papers that present IT management perspectives from professionals around the world. The papers seek to offer new ideas, refine old ones, and pose interesting scenarios to help the reader develop company-sensitive management strategies.

This book presents information on knowledge management and mapping in the context of the learning organization, including the design of information technology in Internet-enabled organization forms.

Discusses the impact of emerging trends in information technology towards solutions capable of managing information within open, principally unbounded, operational environments.