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.

In the meantime, Merrie Morris, Jeremy Pickens and I are organizing another workshop on Collaborative Information Seeking at CSCW 2010 in Savannah, which promises to be quite interesting; I’ll be posting the papers on the workshop site when all the submissions are finalized.

A comparison in themes discussed in papers at the three workshops is illuminating:

The only significant change is a pronounced increase in emphasis on model building and theories of collaborative information seeking, reflecting the accumulation of people’s experience with the phenomena of collaboration. The lack of recommendation papers in the 2008 workshop reflects an explicit selection bias on our part. Of course the details that interest people have shifted, but it is good to see a robust, multi-disciplinary approach to exploring this interesting field. Let’s see what the next decade brings!

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