Year 1

Members of the research-team will prepare the research assistants to apply the conceptual framework in work settings. The participating work-teams will be selected, general work scenarios for them completed, and arrangements will be made for the following phases.

The first work-team will be observed for about a week. The researchers will observe work-team meetings and individuals as they carry out specific information retrieval tasks. Interviews will also be conducted to collect data that is not accessible through observation. The observation period may be segmented and extend beyond one week when work-team members are not available for observation on consecutive days.

The research team will get together at the end of the observation period for the first work-team to analyze the data collected. Based on just a single case, this analysis will provide preliminary data for answering the research questions. It will establish the first iteration for what will eventually become an expanded work-centered framework for CIR.

The research team will collect and analyze data for the remaining three work-teams, one after the other.

Year 2

At the end of this phase of the study, answers to the research questions will be based on data that has been collected from the four work-teams. In this way, an expanded framework for our investigation of collaborative information retrieval will be in place.

To validate and generalize the findings of phases 2, 3 and 4, the research team will develop a survey instrument for gathering data from a larger population. The survey will be based on the results of the previous phases of the research study and will probably be administered electronically. It is premature at this point to predict the exact nature of the instrument, but it may include a questionnaire and an interview schedule. The instrument will be administered to samples of work-team members in the U.S. and in Denmark.

Year 3

The data collected using the survey instrument and interview schedule will be quantitative and qualitative so the methods used to analyze this data will be an appropriate mixture of qualitative coding, categorizing, and verifying plus descriptive and inferential statistical analysis. The goals for this phase of the study will be to:

• test hypotheses that will be formulated from the analysis of the data collected by the end of Phase 4;
• provide additional insight about certain phenomena that relate to collaborative work; and
• assess the extent to which certain IR activities are generalizable to work-team contexts.

Based on the outcomes of phases 2 to 7 of the study, the research team will expound and explain the manifestations of CIR in team-work contexts with a view to elaborating the work-centered framework with a conceptual model of collaborative information retrieval. The research team aims to develop a theory of collaborative information retrieval that will inform phase 8 of the study.

The research team will analyze the data gathered through phases 2 to 7 of the study with a view to identifying innovative technologies and organizational changes that may facilitate and improve collaborative information retrieval. Depending on the nature of the findings in previous phases, this phase of the study may start at the end of phase 7 or earlier.

The results of the study will be of interest to researchers in various areas such as information retrieval, computer supported cooperative work, knowledge management, and information systems. The investigators on this project have an established history of publishing and conference presentations in these fields. Starting at the end of the first year, findings will be presented in meetings and submitted to journals and conferences. In addition, the researchers will develop a website describing the study and its findings. The site will be regularly updated as the study progresses.

One of the key concerns of modern management is how to construct and support effective teams from a distributed workforce of specialists and experts. The aim is to create a team where the dynamics of teamwork facilitate a composite expertise that is greater than the sum of its parts. This form of knowledge management relies on the ability of the team as a whole to tap into and exploit both the tacit knowledge of its members and the information resources and services available within and beyond the organization.

There is little known about how teams acquire information and integrate their knowledge into a common understanding that supports their work. A new focus in industry on knowledge management seeks to capture and reuse the knowledge of individuals, but teams of knowledge workers create a shared understanding that each team member extends through unique expertise. By gaining an understanding of how teams collaborate in retrieving and integrating information, this research can lead to methods and technologies that support, facilitate, and enhance teamwork.

All the investigators have been involved in projects that are closely related to this study, and are planning to continue their work in this area.

Jonathan Grudin has studied the adoption of group support technologies in organizations extensively, ranging from descriptive studies to specific studies of factors contributing to success and failure. With a background in human-computer interaction, he has specifically focused on issues that arise when one shifts from single-user to multi-user contexts. In the Collaboration and Education group at Microsoft Research he is designing and studying the use of a range of novel technologies.

Steven Poltrock has focused for the past 10 years on investigating ways of supporting Integrated Product Development Teams (IPTs) that design and develop aerospace products. He has observed teams at work and interviewed team members in his efforts to understand how they collaborate and what technologies would make their collaboration more effective. Concurrently with these studies of teamwork, Poltrock investigates collaboration technologies. He continuously monitors the state of the art in these technologies. Integrating studies of teamwork and technologies has led to an understanding of requirements for information systems and collaboration environments for collocated and distributed product development teams.

Susan Dumais has been involved in a variety of research projects in the areas of human-computer interaction and information retrieval. Her work has covered a broad spectrum of information management activities ranging from underlying statistical matching algorithms (e.g., Latent Semantic Indexing; collaborative filtering, text classification using support vector machines), to enhanced user interfaces for combining structure and search (e.g., SuperBook, Data Mountain), and larger scale organizational impacts of new technology. The proposed research program in collaborative information retrieval is a natural extension of this work to understanding and supporting the information activities of groups of knowledge workers.

The School of Library and Information Science has been involved in research about information seeking and searching behavior since the mid-1980s. In particular, faculty in the School are interested in work-centered studies that can inform and guide the design and evaluation of information systems. Harry Bruce has a strong record of research into the impact of the Internet and information networks on the work of academics, scholars, and researchers. His research background includes a program of four funded studies (a case study, exploratory study, longitudinal study, and quantitative study) that look at the impact of the Internet on the way academics teach, do research, publish, administer programs, and contribute to their academic disciplines. This program has resulted in two books and numerous articles. Among the many findings of these studies, Bruce noted that academics believe that network technologies have made them more productive and collaborative. These findings have led him to wonder if, in fact, these collaborations in research extend to behaviors that might be characterized as collaborative information retrieval.

Raya Fidel has studied various groups of users, from online searchers, to engineers filtering electronic reports, to high school students searching the Web. All these studies provided recommendations for improved system design. She was recently engaged in a project supported by the Boeing Company to improve the Company’s Web-based intranet. The first phase of the project studied information seeking and searching behavior of engineers when they searched the Web. Based on the results of the first phase, she received another research grant from Boeing to develop a knowledge structure that would help engineers navigate when they look for an expert they wish to consult. Experience she gained in these projects will be valuable to the proposed study.

Annelise Mark Pejtersen is a senior scientist and the leader of the Center for Human- Machine Interaction which is hosted at Risø National Laboratory. The aim of the Center is to create a forum for scientific approaches to the analysis of human behavior in dynamic and cooperative work situations, and to use this forum as a platform for the development of novel principles for the design of systems that visualize the content of cooperative work in a transparent way. The need for cross-disciplinary research for the analysis and design of human machine interaction has been met by gathering in the center a team of around twenty researchers from 4 university institutes and two industrial organizations in computer science, information science, the humanities, and various engineering disciplines.

In her previous research, Annelise Mark Pejtersen has focused for the last decade on the development of a theoretical, general framework for cognitive work domain analysis. Currently, she works with the application of this framework to the widely recognized need for design of systems that support retrieval of information in cooperative work situations. She is currently studying the information seeking behavior of groups of actors in engineering design, with different professional background, education and domain expertise, who cooperate across the organization.

Title : Computer-Supported Meeting Scheduling

Award Number: 9612355

Start Date : September 1, 1996

Expires : August 31, 1999 (Estimated)

Investigator: Jonathan Grudin, University of California Irvine

NSF Program : 6850 Computation & Social Systems, Div of Information & Intelligent Systems

This grant covers empirical studies of the use of shared calendars and meeting scheduling technology in settings where existing technical infrastructures and organizational practices enable most employees to fully participate in the use of a shared system. Although the methods and sites employed in this research may overlap, the research focus differs.