Learning about Potential Users of Collaborative Information Retrieval Systems

One of the key components of designing usable and useful collaborative information retrieval systems is to understand the needs of the users of these systems. Our research team has been exploring collaborative information behavior in a variety of organizational settings. Our research goals have been two-fold: First, to develop a conceptual understanding of collaborative information behavior and second, gather requirements for the design of collaborative information retrieval systems. In this paper, we present a brief overview of our fieldwork in a three different organizational settings, discuss our methodology for collecting data on collaborative information behavior, and highlight some lessons that we are learning about potential users of collaborative information retrieval systems in these domains.