This volume summarizes the author’s work on social information seeking (SIS), and at the same time serves as an introduction to the topic. Sometimes also referred to as social search or social information retrieval, this is a relatively new area of study concerned with the seeking and acquiring of information from social spaces on the Internet. It involves studying situations, motivations, and methods involved in seeking and sharing of information in participatory online social sites, such as Yahoo! Answers, WikiAnswers, and Twitter, as well as building systems for supporting such activities. The first part of the book introduces various foundational concepts, including information seeking, social media, and social networking. As such it provides the necessary basis to then discuss how those aspects could intertwine in different ways to create methods, tools, and opportunities for supporting and leveraging SIS. Next, Part II discusses the social dimension and primarily examines the online question-answering activity. Part III then emphasizes the collaborative aspect of information seeking, and examines what happens when social and collaborative dimensions are considered together. Lastly, Part IV provides a synthesis by consolidating methods, systems, and evaluation techniques related to social and collaborative information seeking. The book is completed by a list of challenges and opportunities for both theoretical and practical SIS work. The book is intended mainly for researchers and graduate students looking for an introduction to this new field, as well as developers and system designers interested in building interactive information retrieval systems or social/community-driven interfaces.

Information retrieval (IR) is a complex human activity supported by sophisticated systems. Information science has contributed much to the design and evaluation of previous generations of IR system development and to our general understanding of how such systems should be designed and yet, due to the increasing success and diversity of IR systems, many recent textbooks concentrate on IR systems themselves and ignore the human side of searching for information. This book is the first text to provide an information science perspective on IR. Unique in its scope, the book covers the whole spectrum of information retrieval, including: history and background information behaviour and seeking task-based information searching and retrieval approaches to investigating information interaction and behaviour information representation access models evaluation interfaces for IR interactive techniques web retrieval, ranking and personalization recommendation, collaboration and social search multimedia: interfaces and access. Readership: Senior undergraduates and masters' level students of all information and library studies courses and practising LIS professionals who need to better appreciate how IR systems are designed, implemented and evaluated.

With the increasingly complex and ubiquitous data available through modern technology, digital information is being utilized daily by academics and professionals of all disciplines and career paths. Information Seeking Behavior and Technology Adoption: Theories and Trends brings together the many theories and meta-theories that make information science relevant across different disciplines. Highlighting theories that had their base in the early days of text-based information and expanding to the digitization of the Internet, this book is an essential reference source for those involved in the education and training of the next-generation of information science professionals, as well as those who are currently working on the design and development of our current information products, systems, and services.

T The Turn analyzes the research of information seeking and retrieval (IS&R) and proposes a new direction of integrating research in these two areas: the fields should turn off their separate and narrow paths and construct a new avenue of research. An essential direction for this avenue is context as given in the subtitle Integration of Information Seeking and Retrieval in Context. Other essential themes in the book include: IS&R research models, frameworks and theories; search and works tasks and situations in context; interaction between humans and machines; information acquisition, relevance and information use; research design and methodology based on a structured set of explicit variables - all set into the holistic cognitive approach. The present monograph invites the reader into a construction project - there is much research to do for a contextual understanding of IS&R. The Turn represents a wide-ranging perspective of IS&R by providing a novel unique research framework, covering both individual and social aspects of information behavior, including the generation, searching, retrieval and use of information. Regarding traditional laboratory information retrieval research, the monograph proposes the extension of research toward actors, search and work tasks, IR interaction and utility of information. Regarding traditional information seeking research, it proposes the extension toward information access technology and work task contexts. The Turn is the first synthesis of research in the broad area of IS&R ranging from systems oriented laboratory IR research to social science oriented information seeking studies.

Today’s complex, information-intensive problems often require people to work together. Mostly these tasks go far beyond simply searching together; they include information lookup, sharing, synthesis, and decision-making. In addition, they all have an end-goal that is mutually beneficial to all parties involved. Such “collaborative information seeking” (CIS) projects typically last several sessions and the participants all share an intention to contribute and benefit. Not surprisingly, these processes are highly interactive. Shah focuses on two individually well-understood notions: collaboration and information seeking, with the goal of bringing them together to show how it is a natural tendency for humans to work together on complex tasks. The first part of his book introduces the general notions of collaboration and information seeking, as well as related concepts, terminology, and frameworks; and thus provides the reader with a comprehensive treatment of the concepts underlying CIS. The second part of the book details CIS as a standalone domain. A series of frameworks, theories, and models are introduced to provide a conceptual basis for CIS. The final part describes several systems and applications of CIS, along with their broader implications on other fields such as computer-supported cooperative work (CSCW) and human-computer interaction (HCI). With this first comprehensive overview of an exciting new research field, Shah delivers to graduate students and researchers in academia and industry an encompassing description of the technologies involved, state-of-the-art results, and open challenges as well as research opportunities.