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Collaborative Information Retrieval: Toward a Social Informatics View of IR Interaction

This article attempts to lay down theoretical groundwork for information retrieval (IR) that involves the combined efforts of several users. It is argued that the fundamental intellectual problems of IR are the production and consumption of knowledge. Knowledge production is fundamentally a collaborative labor, which is deeply embedded in the practices of a community of participants constituting a domain. The current technological advances in networked systems make the intertextual and intersubjective nature of meaning production and communication readily visible by merging various heterogeneous media into the homogenizing framework of the digital medium. Collaborative IR as envisaged in this article would be based on the ethos of voluntary cooperation to facilitate free exchange of ideas and stimulate creativity. What sorts of functionalities can be expected in a Collaborative IR system are illustrated with the help of some examples of collaborative systems and services from various domains. © 1998 John Wiley & Sons, Inc.