Collaborative information retrieval environment: integration of information retrieval with group support systems

Observations of information retrieval (IR) system user experiences reveal a strong desire for collaborative search while at the same time suggesting that collaborative capabilities are rarely, and then only in a limited fashion, supported by current searching and visualization tools. Equally interesting is the fact that observations of user experiences with group support systems (GSS) reveal that although access to external information and the ability to search for relevant material is often vital to the progress of GSS sessions, integrated support for collaborative searching and visualization of results is lacking in GSS systems. After reviewing both user experiences described in IR and GSS literature and observing and interviewing users of existing IR and GSS commercial and prototype systems, the authors conclude that there is an obvious demand for systems supporting multi-user IR. It is surprising to the authors that very little attention has been given to the common ground shared by these two important research domains. With this in mind, our paper describes how user experiences with IR and GSS systems have shed light on a promising new area of collaborative research and led to the development of a prototype that merges the two paradigms into a collaborative information retrieval environment (CIRE). The paper presents a theory developed from initial user experiences with our prototype and describes plans to test the efficacy of this new paradigm empirically through controlled experimentation.