Social information behaviour in Bookshops: implications for digital libraries

We discuss here our observations of the interaction of bookshop customers with the books and with each other. Contrary to our initial expectations, customers do not necessarily engage in focused, joint information search, as observed in libraries, but rather the bookshop is treated as a social space similar to a cafe. Our results extend the known repertoire of collaborative behaviours, supporting further development of models of user tasks and goals. We compare our findings with previous work and discuss possible implications of our observations for the design of digital libraries as places of both information access and social interaction

Interactive acquisition and sharing: Understanding the dynamics of HIV/AIDS information networks

HIV/AIDS information is an important resource for people affected by the disease, particularly information that they obtain from other people. Although existing studies reveal that people with HIV/AIDS (PHAs) rely extensively on personal relationships for HIV/AIDS information, they explain little about how this happens as a social process. To investigate how PHAs and their friends/family members acquire and share network-mediated HIV/AIDS information, semistructured, in-depth interviews were conducted in three rural regions of Canada. Interviews were carried out with 114 PHAs, their friends/family members, and health care and service providers. A network solicitation and chain-referral recruitment procedure was used to delineate HIV/AIDS information networks for participants. Interview data were analyzed qualitatively and compared to Haythornthwaite's ( 1996 ) concepts of network-mediated information processes and Talja and Hansen's ( 2006 ) collaborative information behavior framework. Findings revealed that participants obtained HIV/AIDS information from their networks through five interactive processes: joint seeking, tag-team seeking, exposure, opportunity, and legitimation. The results of this study advance information behavior theory by pointing to the interactive character of information behavior and introducing new concepts to describe everyday life collaborative information behavior. This research also demonstrates the extensive interplay between health information exchange and the sharing of emotional support. The insights emanating from this study suggest that health information practice might benefit from a focus on program strategies such as building information network capacity, developing collaborative information retrieval systems and relationship-building, in addition to the more traditional library-related concerns of reference encounters, collections, and institutional Web sites.Peer Reviewedhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/64304/1/21151_ftp.pd

A comparison of action transitions in individual and collaborative exploratory web search

Collaboration in Web search can be characterized as implicit or explicit in terms of intent, and synchronous or asynchronous in terms of concurrency. Different collaboration style may greatly affect search actions. This paper presents a user study aiming to compare search processes in three different conditions: pair of users working on the same Web search tasks synchronously with explicit communication, pair of users working on the same Web search tasks asynchronously without explicit communication and single users work separately. Our analysis of search processes focused on the transition of user search actions logged in our exploratory Web search system called Collab-Search. The results show that the participants exhibited different patterns of search actions under different conditions. We also found that explicit communication is one of the possible sources for users to obtain ideas of queries, and the explicit communication between users also promotes their implicit communication. Finally this study provides some guidance on the range of behaviors and activities that a collaborative search system should support. © Springer-Verlag 2012