Barriers to collaborative information seeking in organizations

There has been a growing interest within the information sciences and HCI communities to understand the role of collaboration in facilitating information seeking. This focus had led to the emergence of the research area of collaborative information seeking (CIS). Although researchers are starting to identify various activities and mechanisms that underlie CIS, we know very little about the barriers to CIS. In this study, we used Mechanical Turk (MTurk) to gather data from 307 participants to understand the barriers to CIS in organizations. Through our data analysis, we identified a variety of barriers that hinder CIS. These barriers fell under four broad categories - organizational, technical, individual, and team. These barriers also had a strong temporal component which we highlight in the discussion. From these findings, we discuss some design implications for information retrieval systems.