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Collaborative Information Seeking in Professional Work-Settings: A Study of Equipment Utilization

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Abstract

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 presents first empirical results in an ongoing research project: We report on a pilot user study that investigates the collaborative IS&S practices of three work groups in academic and industrial research facilities. The aim of the conducted pilot study was to capture the use of software technologies for realizing collaboration, information seeking and sharing in real-world work settings. We discuss resulting design implications as guideline for extending the ezDL (ezDL: Easy Access to Digital Libraries, www.ezdl.de) system towards supporting collaborative IS&S activities.

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Acknowledgements

This work has been partly supported by the FP7 EU project SMART VORTEX.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. FernUniversität in Hagen, 58084, Hagen, Germany

    Thilo Böhm, Claus-Peter Klas & Matthias Hemmje

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  1. Thilo Böhm
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  2. Claus-Peter Klas
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  3. Matthias Hemmje
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Correspondence to Thilo Böhm.

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Böhm, T., Klas, CP. & Hemmje, M. Collaborative Information Seeking in Professional Work-Settings: A Study of Equipment Utilization. Datenbank Spektrum 14, 29–38 (2014). https://doi.org/10.1007/s13222-014-0145-2

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