Social and interactional practices for disseminating current awareness information in an organisational setting

Abstract

Current awareness services are designed to keep users informed about recent developments based around user need profiles. In organisational settings, they may operate through both electronic and social interactions aimed at delivering information that is relevant, pertinent and current. Understanding these interactions can reveal the tensions in current awareness dissemination and help inform ways of making services more effective and efficient. We report an in-depth, observational study of electronic current awareness use within a large London law firm. The study found that selection, re-aggregation and forwarding of information by multiple actors gives rise to a complex sociotechnical distribution network. Knowledge management staff act as a layer of “intelligent filters” sensitive to complex, local information needs; their distribution decisions address multiple situational relevance factors in a situation fraught with information overload and restrictive time-pressures. Their decisions aim to optimise conflicting constraints of recall, precision and information quantity. Critical to this is the use of dynamic profile updates which propagate back through the network through formal and informal social interactions. This supports changes to situational relevance judgements and so allows the network to ‘self-tune’. These findings lead to design requirements, including that systems should support rapid assessment of information items against an individual’s interests; that it should be possible to organise information for different subsequent uses; and that there should be back-propagation from information consumers to providers, to tune the understanding of their information needs.

Introduction

People acquire information in many ways. Understanding the variety of ways in which information is acquired and how these play out in situ is of key interest to researchers and system designers interested in understanding how to design for more effective information interactions. Whilst a good deal of information behaviour research has focussed on active information seeking, there is a dearth of literature on information behaviours surrounding passive information acquisition. Included within this is the way in which people access and use current awareness services. And yet systems that support current awareness monitoring provide an increasingly significant way in which users obtain information. Professionals, in particular, represent a significant user-group, given their need to stay abreast of developments in their field. Information providers are reacting to this need through the provision of increasing numbers of electronic current awareness services (otherwise known as ‘alerting services’, ‘auto alerts’, ‘selective dissemination of information’ (SDI), or ‘notification systems’). To take an example from the domain on which we focus in this paper, Lexis®PSL brings together a range of different information and resources specifically for lawyers working in different areas of law. As an addition to this service subscribers can receive a regular update which alerts them to legal developments in their area and new resources provided by the service.

Since current awareness services respond to information needs that remain relatively stable over time, they naturally lend themselves to the construction of relatively stable infrastructures for information delivery. In organisational settings these are particularly evident, their role being to control and incrementally adjust the flow of information, rather like irrigation systems controlling and diverting the flow of water. In modern organisations they are typically sociotechnical in nature, involving both people and technology in coordinated action to make the organisation as a whole more knowledgeable and effective. Understanding how these systems operate in their natural contexts represents a key resource for informing the development of user-technologies to make such systems more effective.

This provides the context for the current paper in which we report a naturalistic study of electronic current awareness distribution in a large, London law firm. Our aim was to understand the ways in which legal workers interact with and collaborate around the propagation of current awareness information in different parts of the company. Data was gathered through contextual inquiry observations with 21 lawyers and knowledge management workers. We observed their interactions with current awareness information and used these situations to prompt discussion of broader contextual issues. From this we developed a systemic perspective on the distribution of current awareness alerts which provides insights into what people do and how they collaboratively organise action and interaction.

The remainder of the paper is structured as follows. In Section 2, we discuss the research context relating to collaborative information seeking and electronic current awareness information. In Section 3 we describe our data-gathering and analysis method. In Section 4 we report our findings and in Section 5 we discuss these with particular reference to how automated systems might augment prevalent sociotechnical distribution systems.