PAWS meeting - Feb 25, 2009

Comments on the first presentation here.

In the second part of the meeting Zhen presented her work about collaborative information behavior (CIB). She studied aspects of CIB by simulating e-discovery tasks and obtained some insights such as: Communication is frequent and an essential component of CIB; the division of labor is common in the collaborative task of e-discovery; and it is important for collaborators to keep “awareness” of each other’s activities to make sure the collaboration goes well. Based on these insights, some functions for retrieval systems that support CIB were proposed: Collaborative information retrieval technologies should support collaborative information behaviors including verbal communication and text exchanging. A well designed CIR system should support both synchronous collaboration and asynchronous collaboration.