Towards Supporting Community Information Seeking and Use

Abstract

In this paper we explore issues surrounding the design of systems that will effectively support community information seeking and use. We discuss the need for information retrieval systems to move away for the single user paradigm to one that recognizes the collaborative nature of information seeking and use. We also examine the collaborative information retrieval literature and derive implications for community informatics. The paper also explores the unique challenges of designing systems to support information seeking and use in a community context, and attempts to provide design guidelines that will enable researchers and practitioners to develop such systems.