Introduction to Special Issue of Information Processing and Management on Collaborative Information Seeking

This special issue brings together papers that describe some of the many ways that collaborative information seeking manifests itself. Some papers report on collaborative practices in a range of domains, including medical (Hertzum), legal (Attfield et al.), and online Q&A (Gazan). Others propose and evaluate models of collaborative activity (Evans and Chi; Evans et al.; Wilson and Schraefel; Foley and Smeaton), and others describe systems and algorithms that support collaboration in various ways (Boydell and Smyth; Fernandez‐Luna et al., Halvey et al., Morris et al.;  Shah et al.).
  
Our perspective is that the high‐level goal of this research is to improve the way that people manage their collaborative information seeking online. Thus we study how people work to help us understand the range of problems and opportunities, we build models and theories to make sense of the observed phenomena, and we build and evaluate systems to test our understanding.  

The papers in this issue represent a broad range of interpretations and approaches to collaborative search, but they are just the beginning.  We expect that a better understanding of collaboration will lead to more system building, which in turn will expose both users and designers to more opportunities to establish novel patterns of work, producing more evaluations, and improving the richness of our models. As this body of work grows, existing challenges such as evaluation metrics and test collections will also need to be addressed.