Opportunistic acquisition of information: The new frontier for information user studies. Sponsored by SIG USE
Sanda Erdelez, Elaine G. Toms, Kevin S. Rioux, Makiko Miwa · Proceedings of the American Society for Information Science and Technology · 2002
Human acquisition of information consists of purposeful actions and opportunistic experiences through which people find information. While users' information seeking behavior has been a dominant interest of many user studies researchers, opportunistic acquisition of information has until recently been largely neglected. However, with the emergence and widespread use of digital technologies, there is a growing interest to empirically investigate concepts such as: information encountering, accidental discovery of information, and serendipitous information retrieval. This emerging research promises to enrich our understanding of the complex nature of human information behavior. Presenters in this panel report the findings from their research efforts to model and empirically investigate various aspects of opportunistic acquisition of information. Accidental, incidental or serendipitous discoveries of information, often while attempting to achieve a concrete goal, are largely ignored in information systems development. Yet evidence demonstrates that serendipitous information is often rewarding and valuable (Toms, 2000a, 2000b). Is serendipitous retrieval truly by chance, or is it more closely aligned with secondary implicit information needs? If so, how might the system trigger these experiences? In the work reported here, serendipitous information use experienced by people in several domains, e.g., generic web browsing, newspaper reading, history, etc. were assessed to identify the primer of such an experience. The research is also exploring methods for presenting and inducing such experiences. Information encountering (IE) addresses situations when users, while searching for information on one topic, stumble across information relevant to another topic of interest to them. Based on early exploratory research of IE (Erdelez, 1997) common steps in users' information encountering episodes have been identified: noticing (the initial perception of encountered information), stopping (the interruption of the original information seeking activity), examining (the assessment of usefulness of the encountered information), capturing (the extraction and manipulation of information, including information saving for future use and information sharing with other users) and returning (reconnection with the initial information seeking task). The recent study of information encountering on the Web (Erdelez, 2000) suggests that these elements may not be present in each IE experience and that the mode of their fulfillment will depend on the characteristics of the specific information environment. The compound act of acquiring information in Internet environments and subsequently sharing the information in some way can be referred to as information acquiring-and-sharing in Internet environments. Internet-based environments provide opportunities for both purposeful acquisition as well as accidental discovery (encountering) of information that users find to be of interest to themselves as well as to other people they know (Erdelez & Rioux, 2000). While a recent study (Rioux, 2000) reports that information acquiring-and-sharing is common among Internet users, it still remains under examined in the information studies literature. In this panel, Rioux reports on his current research efforts to articulate an in-depth description and preliminary model of processes associated with information acquiring-and-sharing in Internet-based environments. Many users experience a feeling of opportunistic hope when they encounter unknown but seemingly useful information sources while looking for information on the Internet (Miwa, 2000). Source encountering is different from information encountering in that it occurred while users were actively engaged in purposeful information seeking. Encountering with partially relevant information sources in active search generates users' unplanned or situated actions in their subsequent information behaviour (Spink, et al., 1998; Wilson, 1999). Some users may switch their information seeking goals at source encountering and start searching for information on different topic for other information seeking goals. The combination of source encountering and opportunistic hope might have implications on relevance judgment in conventional IR research. Users are likely to encounter a list of metadata of unfamiliar sources that match their query in information retrieval. They may select from among these metadata to follow up based on their own relevance judgments or an opportunistic hope they had at the time of encountering.