If you are doing research in interactive information retrieval, information seeking, collaborative search, and the like (that is, you’re concerned with what users do when they look for information), you might consider submitting  paper to IIiX 2010.

IIiX will explore the relationships between the contexts that affect information retrieval and information seeking, how these contexts impact information behavior, and how knowledge of information contexts and information behaviors can help design truly interactive information systems.

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Collaborative and cooperative aspects of information storage, seeking and retrieval have become a hot topic in recent years e.g. [1,2,4]. The acknowledgment that information seeking is a collaborative activity is part of a trend toward foregrounding the social in system design [5].

We wrote this in the introduction of a SIGGROUP report on a CSCW 1998 workshop on, you guessed it, Collaborative and Co-operative Information Seeking in Digital Information Environments. Plus ça change. The workshop was organized by Elizabeth Churchill, Joe Sullivan, Dave Snowdon and me. It is interesting to go back and read the position papers submitted by Mark Ackerman, Andrew Cohen, Jesus Favela, Mark Ginsburg,  Tom Gross, Timothy Koschmann, Joseph McCarthy, Alan Munro, Kevin Palfreyman,  Volker Paulsen, Alfredo Sanchez, Stefan Scholze, John Thomas, Michael Twidale, Volker Wulf, and Guillermo Zeballos.

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I’ve attended many Hypertext conferences in the past, and have spent a number of years at UofT, so it’s a double pleasure to point out that the Hypertext 2010 conference will be held at the University of Toronto June 13-16. The conference will cover topics including social computing, adaptive hypermedia, and hypertext in education and communication. The deadline for submission in January 18, 2010. For more info, please see the CFP.

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Merrie Morris, Jeremy Pickens and I are organizing a second workshop on collaborative information seeking to be held in conjunction with CSCW2010 on Feb 7, 2010. More details on an earlier post about the workshop, and on the workshop site itself. Look over the position papers from the first workshop (some of which will be published in an IP&M Special Issue soon), and submit one yourself!

Looking forward to lots of good discussion!

Jeremy and I have been blogging about collaborative search for a while, and it is our pleasure to announce that Merrie Morris and we are organizing another workshop on Collaborative Information Seeking. The first workshop was held in 2008 in conjunction with the JCDL 2008 conference. We had a many interesting presentations and a lot of discussion about systems, algorithms, and evaluation.You can find the proceedings from the workshop on arXiv.org (metadata and papers) and on the workshop web site.

It’s time to revisit this topic, this time in conjunction with the CSCW 2010 conference. The workshop call for participation is here. Our goal is

to bring together researchers with backgrounds in CSCW, social computing, information retrieval, library sciences and HCI to discuss the research challenges associated with the emerging field of collaborative information seeking.

To participate, please submit a 2-4 page position paper in the ACM format by November 20th. The workshop will take place in February, in Savannah, Georgia. Hope to see you there!

Maribeth and Scott are collaborating with Saadi Lahlou on a special issue of the International Journal of Web Based Communities. This special issue grows out of a series of workshops at the UbiComp and CSCW conferences for a community of people interested in technologies that support meetings as well as how those technologies are changing our notion of what a meeting is. We see a deep interest in this community in understanding, augmenting, and challenging meeting practices and group collaborations across a variety of media spaces and contexts.

Please see the CFP web page for more information.

Meredith Ringel Morris, Jeremy Pickens and I are editing a Special Issue of Information Processing & Management on Collaborative Information Seeking. Our goal is to bring together papers that describe explicit (intentional) collaboration during various aspects of online information seeking. In contract to recommendation or collaborative filtering work, we are looking for work that describes small groups of people working toward a common goal.

The deadline for submission is May 8, 2009.

More details on the call are available here.