Social Information Seeking in Digital Libraries

abstract Information seeking is a complex task, and many models of the basic, individual seeking process have been proposed. Similarly, many tools now exist to support " sit-forward " information seeking by single users, where the solitary seeker interacts intensively with a search engine or classification scheme. However, in many situations, there is a clear interaction between social contexts beyond the immediate interaction between the user and the retrieval system. In this chapter we demonstrate a number of contrasting uses of the social aspects of information seeking, and through those propose, demonstrate, and realize social models of information seeking that complement existing information seeking models and technologies. These include: information sharing among humanities researchers; creation of profiles for continuous, ongoing searching of medical material; and the capture of models of user behaviors in an interactive, mobile tourist information system. From the human perspective we illustrate differing social techniques and issues including: explicit and implicit sharing; seeking facilitated by subject (medical, academic) experts and search experts (librarians); and anonymized and attributed social environments. Whereas many papers focus on particular social retrieval technologies, in this chapter we abstract a number of different approaches to present underlying principles, architectures, and models that can be adopted for a wider range of applications. We focus on digital library (DL) technology, as DLs have well-accepted architectures that support a wide variety of information seeking tools. We also address the key related issue of models of information seeking—models that have strongly influenced the design of DL technologies.