Collaborative information behavior: Exploring collaboration and coordination during information seeking and retrieval activities

Collaborative information behavior is an important and growing area of research in the field of information behavior. Although collaboration is a key component of work in organizational and other settings, most research has primarily focused on individual information behavior and not the collaborative aspects of information behavior. Consequently, there is a pressing need to understand both the conceptual features of this type of behavior and the technical approaches to support these collaborative activities. In this chapter, the authors describe current research in this area and what we are learning about collaboration and coordination during these activities. In particular, the authors present details of ethnographic field studies that are starting to uncover the characteristics of collaborative information behavior. They also discuss a preliminary collaborative information behavior model and some technical explorations that they are conducting in this space.