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This study examined the effects of two factors, topic familiarity and search skills, on users' query reformulation behavior in health information searching. Four hypotheses were tested. Forty five graduate students participated in our study and searched for health‐related topics on our experimental retrieval system. Their search actions were recorded by a server‐side log system and their demographic...
In this paper, we examine the value of social question‐answering (Q&A) services as a platform for social search. We present a quasi‐field study where we instructed 20 study participants to use a social Q&A service, Yahoo! Answers, for a period of one week, and interviewed them about their experience with Yahoo! Answers based on the questions (N=99) they posted to the site. The results indicate...
The purpose of this study is to enrich our understanding of social question and answer (Q&A) sites as a health information source for teens. To do so we investigated answers to 81 informational questions about eating disorders posted in Yahoo! Answers, a social Q&A site. Through a content analysis, we found that users do not always respond to eating disorder questions with credible, factual...
As people increasingly search the Internet for health‐related topics like treatment options, it is important to understand how they construct their searches, and how they understand the results. In this paper, we report results from an exploratory lab study with 40 cross‐sectional participants and follow‐up interviews with eleven of them about their use of search engines to find treatment options...
This study examines how digital repositories with a preservation mandate are engaging in disaster planning, particularly in relation to their pursuit of trusted digital repository status. For those that are engaging in disaster planning, the study examines the creation of formal disaster response and recovery plans. Findings indicate that the process of going through an audit for certification as...
The availability of research data through digital repositories has made data reuse a possibility in a growing number of fields. This paper reports on the results of interviews with 27 zoologists, 43 quantitative social scientists and 22 archaeologists. It examines how data reuse contributes to the apprenticeship process and aids students in becoming full members of scholarly disciplines. Specifically,...
End‐user programmers, those who write code but lack formal training in computer science, are often reliant on various tools such as API documentation or searching the Web for information in order to complete a specific task. This study examines the information foraging behaviors of a group of web and graphic designers engaged in a series of code modification tasks. We find that users were largely...
This study examines the presentation of self on Facebook by looking at user perceptions and behavior in times of conflict. Through semi‐structured interviews with Facebook users, we examined users' perceptions of Facebook as a front stage for social performance as well as the context of conflicts that they experience on Facebook. The findings show that interviewees experience conflicts when they encounter...
Sixty Harvard undergraduate students, paired up as 30 two‐person teams, participated in a usability study where they were interviewed and asked to perform eight tasks using the Library Explorer software on the Microsoft PixelSense tabletop. This paper focuses exclusively on the collaboration aspect of the study results. During the research session, participants' verbal responses, their interaction...
The current study proceeds from a transdisciplinary, ecological and systemic angle as it undertakes to interrogate the information skills of users who are uninitiated and untrained to a competitive intelligence model (and specifically, to the French model, which proposes a more generic and all‐encompassing approach than other models). In addition to outlining a framework for assessing these informactors'...
In this research, we analyze the referral queries and associated site‐search queries at the session level from searchers coming from web search engines. Findings are based on a random sample of 10,000 from a total of 327,261 searching sessions of an online Spanish entertainment business collected over the course of a five month period from March 23, 2012 to August 26, 2012. We find six searching strategies...
Social question‐answering (SQA) allows people to ask questions in natural language and receive answers from others. While research on SQA has focused on the quality of answers provided with implications for system‐based interventions, few studies have examined whether the questions asked to elicit these answers accurately depict an asker's information need. To address this gap, the current study explores...
We investigate the automatic assignment of research methods to journal articles from the domain of Social Sciences. We employ Computer Science and Computational Linguistics methodology to perform this automatic assignment of metadata. The multi‐label classification system we present uses only abstracts and titles of journal articles as input. Our best system is able to assign the important research...
Since the recent emergence of electronic literature resources, researchers have begun to adopt new information‐seeking practices. The purpose of this research is to investigate the information needs and searching behaviors of researchers, and their implications for electronic literature search tools. We conducted mixed‐method case studies involving interviews, diary logs, and observations of computer...
In this article, we examine the similarities between the concept of appraisal, a process that takes place within the archives, and the concept of relevance judgement, a process fundamental to information retrieval systems. More specifically, we revisit appraisal/selection criteria proposed as a result of archival and digital curation communities, and, compare them to relevance criteria as discussed...
This study examined the various aspects of adolescents downloading music from the Internet. As of the present time (2013), no comprehensive study has been done among Israeli adolescents with regard to music downloading from the Internet. The present study examined the correlation between adolescents' moral attitude towards music downloading and the extent of their actual engagement in the activity...
This paper presents the design and study of interactive user modeling to support exploratory search tasks. Contrary to traditional interactions, such as query based search, query suggestions, or relevance feedback, interactive user modeling allows a user to perceive the state of the user model at all times and provide feedback that directly rewards or penalizes it. The technique allows the user to...
This paper describes our different retrieval approaches conducted on a cultural heritage (CH) content test‐collection. In our study, our main objective is to measure the relative merit of various query expansion and semantic enrichment techniques. To do so we considered different strategies based on blind‐query expansion as well as using external resource, namely Wikipedia. In using external knowledge...
This research uses the methodology of web analytics to examine the usage of subscription databases at a major academic library. Our research goal is the development of key performance indicators from which academic libraries can evaluate the business value of their content collections. There are 1,447 databases to which this academic library provides access, and these databases received nearly 2.5...
The research reported in this paper explored decision making and information use by public safety personal leading teams responding to major incidents. The research methodology was qualitative using critical incident technique and observation grounded in Activity Theory as meta‐theoretical framework. The data gathered uncovered intuitive as well as analytic modes of thinking. We argue that this has...
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