Dear Colleagues,
We are organizing a workshop on Collaborative Information Behavior at GROUP 2009 (http://www.group2009conference.com/) which will take place May 10th-13th in Sanibel Island, Florida. If this area is of interest to you, please consider submitting a 2-4 page position paper by Mar 25th, 2009.
Organizers:
Madhu Reddy, Penn State University
Sharoda A. Paul, Penn State University
Jim Jansen, Penn State University
Jonathan Foster, University of Sheffield
Michael Twidale, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign
Overview:
People frequently engage in collaborative information seeking tasks in their professional and personal lives. For instance, family members might collaboratively search the Web for information when buying a new car or healthcare providers in a hospital might collaboratively find and use information needed to diagnose and treat patients. Collaborative Information Behavior (CIB) can be defined as "activities that a group or team of people undertakes to identify and resolve a shared information need". CIB encompasses a range of activities such as collaborative information seeking, retrieval, sharing, sensemaking, and use. It can occur on different scales, ranging from small groups in organizations and classrooms to social search and sensemaking on the Internet.
CIB, both conceptually and technically, is a new and emerging field. Consequently, there are a number of challenges that still need to be addressed. These include fieldwork challenges of studying collaborative information seeking and use "in the wild", finding appropriate methods for studying CIB, the dearth of CIB models, and challenges with developing collaborative information retrieval tools.
In this workshop, we are interested in bringing together researchers (from both academia and industry) working on the wide range of conceptual and technical issues in the area of CIB to address these challenges.
Workshop themes:
Current research in CIB
- Settings and tasks in which collaborative information behavior takes place
- Levels of CIB - from small groups to social search and sensemaking on the Internet
- Fieldwork findngs about how and why people collaborate to find, share, and make sense of information
- Methodologies for conducting research to examine CIB
- Models of CIB
- New UIs, tools, and algorithms to support collaborative search and information retrieval
- Evaluation techniques for collaborative information retrieval tools
Challenges in fieldwork, model development, system design and evaluation
- Appropriate methods for examining CIB in the field
- Development of surveys to examine CIB
- Development of CIB models
Research agenda for the field of CIB
- Important research questions which remain to be answered
- Effective research methodologies for studying CIB
- Trends in CIB research and where research will be headed in the near future
Important dates:
- Mar 25th, 2009: Position papers due
- Mar 28th, 2009: Notification of acceptance
- Apr 5th, 2009: Early registration deadline for GROUP 2009
- May 10th, 2009: Workshop
Submissions:
Workshop position papers should be two to four pages long in ACM format. Please email .pdf or .doc versions to spaul@ist.psu.edu by 5:00pm PST on Mar 25th, 2009.
For further information about the workshop, including the proposed agenda, see the workshop website at http://www.personal.psu.edu/sap246/CIBWorkshop.html
Please pass on this CFP to colleagues who might be interested.
Thanks and looking forward to your submission!
CIB Workshop Organizers